


Aeternus Solem

by onbeinganangel



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 25 Days of Draco and Harry - Traditional, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Auror Harry Potter, Case Fic, Curse Damage, Explicit Sexual Content, Flashbacks, Getting Back Together, Illness, M/M, Mystery, Only One Bed, Sad Harry Potter, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Unspeakable Draco Malfoy, advent 2020, christmas but i did it all wrong, just a ton of pining and yearning and suffering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:22:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 25
Words: 36,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27821446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onbeinganangel/pseuds/onbeinganangel
Summary: On December 1st, Harry Potter gets sent halfway across the world to attempt to break a possibly fatal curse on an unnamed British Unspeakable — except said Unspeakable is not unnamed at all and Harry has been in love with him for over four years.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Comments: 429
Kudos: 452
Collections: 25 Days of Draco and Harry 2020





	1. First of December

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fic is my favourite way to use my free time and december is my favourite time of the year so it would be wrong not to give 25 Days of Draco and Harry 2020 a go, right?
> 
> this story is still a WIP but I already have an endless list of people to thank for being wonderful and helpful and making this happen: so thank you to [sitp](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sitp/profile) and [tai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tainara_black/profile) for telling me everything about brazilian christmas, to [draco4draco](https://draco4draco.tumblr.com) and [primaveracerezos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/primaveracerezos/profile) for beta reading some of my pre-prompt drafts and to [thestarryknight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thestarryknight/profile) for, well, everything ever.
> 
> this will have a happy ending but it's a little touch and go on the festive spirit, so read the tags please! i'll be putting further content warnings for specific chapters on the notes too as we go along <3
> 
> as always, before i go, here's a little note that just applies to everything in life: fuck jk rowling

Harry looks around the loud bullpen as he pushes a pile of papers to one side of his desk and sighs heavily. He’s just gotten back from a case up in Yorkshire and he’s knackered and in desperate need of a shower. He only needs to finish up his report, leave it with Robards and he can go home and sleep for at least fifty hours straight. It’s what he deserves.

After the wet and miserable couple of weeks he’s had, he’d almost wished for London to be covered in snow for his return. A proper snow too — none of that stuff that hits the floor and turns to brown mush within minutes. A proper snow day, like they had at Hogwarts. With snow heavy and deep enough that the sun can shine through and make the day bright without melting it all away.

He thought maybe snow was what was missing to help him feel festive. If it snowed, he would brave the shops for a few early presents. He would take Teddy out for a run around in the park, maybe try ice skating. Perhaps he’d even go flying. Wind in his hair, the cold biting at his ears and cheeks. That would do him good. But there are no snow covered branches on the trees or park benches padded with thick blankets of white. All he has is the sweaty and noisy bullpen and his bloody report that is, to be quite frank, making him lose his will to live.

His attention dips as he fills in unimportant shit on the form. He understands reports are necessary to help the justice department actually convict people, he’s heard it enough from Hermione. It’s just… there has to be a better way. Less bureaucracy. Half of the information he’s required to fill in isn’t even remotely relevant to the case. Seriously — how many times does he have to write his own name and Auror Identification Number _on the same sheet of parchment?_

He just needs to get through this. Then he can go home, run himself a bath, maybe even dig out that bubble bath stuff he got for Christmas almost a year ago _(was that from Ginny or was it from that guy he was seeing for a few weeks before Christmas?)_ and sit in it with a cold beer before he gets into bed and hibernates for as long as he can.

But, of course, he has to finish the bloody report first.

It doesn’t help that Miller and Reid, on the desk across from him, are obviously too involved in a bit of office gossip or planning their next little number as _official office clowns_ , which is making Harry want to crawl into a hole and just stay there even more.

“Hey Potter, did you hear about what happened in South America?” starts Miller. Fuck. This better not be some stupid joke. “It’s not South America, you dickhead, it’s Spain,” says Reid. “What? No way.” “You’re so fucking stupid, the report was in Spanish, it’s from Spain.”

 _Fucking hell,_ Harry just doesn’t have the time for this. Luckily, before he can ask what happened — wherever it was that had happened — Robards pops his head out of his office and calls, “Auror Potter. Do you have a second?”

 _Not at all, not even half a second,_ he thinks.

“Yes, sir,” he grits out and grabs his almost finished report in some ridiculous hope that Robards will take pity on him and allow him to leave without finishing it. He strides past Miller and Reid with perhaps more sass than is strictly necessary but, honestly, he can’t bring himself to care. He really doesn’t know why they’re still working for the DMLE. 

The door to Robards’ office (ornate wood with the words “Head Auror” engraved on it) has been left wide open so Harry chooses to hover outside and wait until the Head Auror notices him instead of knocking. Luckily, it doesn’t take Robards long to look up from his desk.

“Come in and have a seat Potter.”

 _I don’t want to have a seat, I want to go home to my bathtub and my fridge and my bed,_ he thinks, petulantly. In his mind, he goes into full Teddy-mode: arms crossed over his chest, pout, stomping his booted heel hard on the polished floor.

But, of course, he sits.

“How can I help, sir? I’ve got the Harrogate report almost finished.”

“We… er, that’s fine, don’t worry about that. Look, Potter, you’re not going to like this.” No. No. Whatever it is, he doesn’t care. He needs to go home and sleep and sort out his Christmas. They have enough fucking Aurors in this place, someone else can deal with it.

“There’s been a situation in Brazil.” _That’s South America,_ provides his stupid, stupid brain. 

Somewhere in the very back of his mind he thinks of the snowy London he’d been dreaming of before Apparating back earlier that day. As the reality of what Robards is most likely asking of him hits, Harry watches the snow covered branches melt away, the blankets of white on the benches turn to puddles, the ice on the cobbled path crack and disappear under heavy booted steps.

Robards continues,“A curse. Something like we’ve never seen before. They’ve requested help from the British authorities a couple of days ago. The Minister has been pondering over what to do about it and, to be truly transparent with you, I have a feeling we weren’t going to help. However, we just got word they’ve got one of ours.”

One of ours? _Christ_. He examines the bullpen in his mind again. Who’s missing? Who’s on holiday? Who the hell would go to Brazil in December?

“An Auror, sir?”

“No, Potter. An Unspeakable.”

An Unspeakable. It had to be some serious business for them to get off their high horses and request the Auror Department’s help. Unless…

“Has the Department of Mysteries been informed, sir?”

“Err, not strictly speaking, no. Their Head is meeting with the Minister as we speak, but they’re…”

Robards stops speaking. He never stops speaking. He’s a grumpy old git, but he’s not a bad superior as it is. He never doubts, never hesitates. Whatever happened in Brazil has to be really bad.

“Potter, let me be frank. You— you’re my best curse breaker. I actually don’t know why you’re an Auror, but you’re good and I’m not about to complain. I am sure they’ve tried to take you down to Mysteries several times and there’s a reason why you’ve not taken the job. I don’t care. As I said, I’m not about to complain.”

Maybe Harry will take the job, next time he’s harassed by the Department of Mysteries. They wouldn’t send him halfway across the world on the first of December after he’s just come back from a two-week long mission. Surely. Probably. Anyway…

“So I take it you’re to send me to Brazil, sir?”

He sighs, knowing the answer already. Tries and fails not to think of his bed, or his bath, or even his sofa — he just needs a kip and a couple of days of doing nothing, that’s all he’s asking for here.

“That’s correct.”

“Are you sending anyone else with me? Are we hoping Mysteries sends someone? What’s the situation here?”

“Well, from what I’ve been told, the problem is that, considering it’s a Dark Curse, Potter, the person they would most likely send with you is the person you’re in charge of bringing back.”

Harry blinks, looks down at his hands, then back at Robards again before he settles on a darker spot by the wooden frame on the wall behind the Head Auror’s balding head. He lets the words sink in. 

He wishes he didn’t know what that meant. But he knows. He knows better than most people that it can only mean one thing. 

_Fuck. No. No. Merlin. Anything but this._

Draco Malfoy is stuck in Brazil suffering from a Dark Curse and Harry is, apparently, his only hope.


	2. Second of December

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just casually putting how much I miss Christmas Markets into this! Also, if you all thought Harry was miserable on that first chapter... well, hold on to your bloody hats for the next... er... 23 days? It's about to get blustery in here.

Harry manages a few hours of sleep after leaving the office. He forgoes the long bubble bath and the beer he’d so desperately craved and falls straight into bed. It’s a good thirteen hours before he wakes up again.

His first thought when he wakes is that he should have never listened to Hermione and let Kreacher go. He debates internally for a while about how to go about his laundry to get it done in time, but finally realises he’s packing for Brazil in December, not Britain. He runs up to the attic and gets his summer clothes down. Packing is perfunctory and practical. It has to be because he doesn’t know when he’s seeing his friends and family next and he has less than twelve hours until the portkey leaves. Twelve hours to buy everyone he loves Christmas presents. It’s a lot less than twelve hours if he considers shops aren’t open 24/7, but he’s trying to remain positive.

He Apparates to Hogsmeade without thinking and gets to work. Ron is easy to buy for and so is Hermione. He goes overboard for Teddy, for the eighth year running. He buys Andromeda a silk scarf and some expensive earrings to make up for it. For someone who hates shopping, he does a reasonable job in just a few hours’ time. Even buying for Ginny and Charlie goes without a hitch. 

He’s tempted to stop at The Three Broomsticks, but he doesn’t fancy sitting there by his lonesome. It does look incredibly inviting, when he peeks in and notices the cosy looking fireplace on the far wall — his favourite corner of the pub — already decorated for Christmas. Rosmerta still goes all out, it looks like. There’s a thick pine garland hanging over the fire, decorated with magical twinkling lights, big red velvet bows and golden bells and Harry wishes he had the heart to brave it. To just say “sod it all”, sit there and let a Butterbeer warm him up from the inside.

But he knows that if he goes in, he’ll either be photographed and end up in the front page of the Prophet the next day or be bothered by dozens of people. He’s still Harry Potter, whether he likes it or not. 

So, enticed by the aroma of frying onions like a pirate to a siren song, he stops at a little stall and gets himself a sausage sandwich smothered in ketchup and a hot toddy. Fuck knows if he’ll even get any Christmas dinner this year, he may as well enjoy a hot toddy while he can. It’s not as good as Hermione’s, but it soothes the ache in his heart.

He knows why he’s so desperate to keep his brain busy, why he’s bought presents without looking at price tags, why he avoided looking at the robe shop in the corner by the gelato place by making sure he had all the bags with him still. He won’t let himself think about it. He’ll do whatever he needs to in order to bring Dra— Unspeakable Malfoy back home and then he will convince Robards he deserves at least two weeks of paid holiday for sacrificing his December time off. That will be that.

He Apparates home, makes himself a cup of tea and sits around organising presents into piles: the ones that must go to the Burrow, the ones for Andromeda’s, a few that will go to Hogwarts. Then Pansy, Blaise, Greg, Theo, Seamus, Dean, Luna. Hermione won’t be happy when she finds out she’ll have to get all of those delivered for him, but it’s not like it’s Harry’s fault. He’s grateful most shop assistants are happy to provide gift wrapping these days because, even with the help of magic, he wouldn’t have managed it in the few hours he has before he needs to get to sleep and get the Portkey to Brazil.

 _God._ _Brazil. The other side of the world._

He cleans the house because he doesn’t know what else to do. Decides he’ll spend his evening decorating the house for Christmas in hopes it’ll mean he will be home before the end of the month. Allowing himself some _Christmas Magic._

He levitates the decoration box out of the attic carefully and opens it on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. His tall everlasting fir is looking lush as ever and, fuck, _he loves magic._ This time of the year always makes him think of the Dursleys, their plastic Christmas tree, the bright tinsel and tacky decorations. He’s grateful for magic, for the Christmasses that it has allowed him ever since he turned eleven.

The tree goes up and it all makes him feel a little cheerier. He usually does this with Teddy, who insists every year that he can put the star on top (he can’t, and Harry has to lift him up onto his shoulders every year). His breath catches a little thinking that he may not be seeing Teddy open his presents this year.

It takes him until just about bedtime to do the whole house. He has a dinner of stale chocolate digestives, another cup of tea and a small tumbler of whiskey at some point, but mostly he tidies and decorates. There’s holly and fairy lights and a small bunch of mistletoe hanging over the kitchen door that has caught many unattentive unlikely pairs in the past few years under it. 

When he’s done, there’s only one thing left in the Christmas decoration box that he takes back into the attic. He decides he won’t even unwrap it and look at it, there’s no point. He looks at the newspaper, losing its shine even though it’s only been four years since he wrapped the bauble in it and put it away. 

He isn’t sure if it hurts more knowing it’s there and not opening it, not looking at it. Or if it would hurt more if he did open it like he does every year, grabbed it in his hands. Either way, he hears the memory clear as day in his mind:

_“I know it’s not fair, Harry, I’m not asking you to quit your job. All I’m asking you is to fucking man up and stop them from using you as a weapon. Don’t you think you’ve had enough of that? You are not the only Auror in the world. I— I can’t live the rest of my life wondering if you’re coming home in one piece or if they’ll send you back to me in a box. I can’t. I can’t do this anymore. You can keep the fucking ornament.”_

He looks at the door, as if he can still hear the slam echoing through the walls, breaking his heart, breaking him into a million tiny little pieces.

Fuck. Jesus. What was he thinking? He can’t go without seeing Ron and Hermione. He may as well die if he doesn’t see them. Before he can overthink it, he Apparates to Ottery St. Catchpole and knocks on his friends’ door, praying he does it quietly enough not to wake up Rosie. 

Hermione opens the door and asks, voice high with obvious worry. “Harry? Is everything okay?” Ron comes running to the door as soon as he hears Harry’s broken “hello” and Harry can’t believe he considered leaving without seeing the two of them.


	3. Third of December

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just wanted to point out that there will be some aspects of the curse Harry is trying to break that will read a little... well, 2020-ish/Covid-esque. I will put content warnings for specifics as we go along, but wanted to make sure you're all aware (before we dive into it any deeper) that there will be themes of curse/illness transmitted by touch and a small touch of isolation to stop the curse!
> 
> Also, while I'm here: thank you so much for all the love so far! I never expect anyone to read WIPs and it's been so lovely reading what you think about this story that is insanely out of my writing comfort zone. Thank you <3

The briefing with Robards, Kingsley and the Head of Mysteries doesn’t take long at all because no one really knows anything about the curse. It takes no longer than half an hour, if even twenty minutes, and no one confirms or denies who the officer stuck in Brazil is. He’s an Unspeakable, so not even Kingsley knows, or at least Harry doesn’t think he does. It’s only when he’s handed the file and the portkey that the Unspeakable who briefed him says, voice low, “Auror Potter. You do realise who this Unspeakable is, correct? We have you on file as knowing of his work for the Department since 2003. Is this going to be a problem at all?”

“No, Sir. I will make sure the curse is removed from every victim in the resort, and I will bring you your Unspeakable back,” he says, but his heart is drumming a frenzied tattoo in his throat, he can feel his body heating up disproportionately to the circumstance.

Soit _is_ Draco. Someone has done something to Draco and left him to die in a fancy resort in Brazil. Of course they’d send Harry to the rescue. _The world clearly doesn’t think Harry’s life has been enough of a joke thus far._

The portkey is shaped like a broken muggle camera. He makes sure to return it to the desk once he lands in Fortaleza. British Aurors are always getting in trouble with various international offices for leaving deactivated portkeys lying about or for putting them in the bin when they’re perfectly fine to be charmed and used again. It’s a big thing at the office these days. Because, of course, it would be worrying if the DMLE started actually caring about important things.

He crosses the road to the building where he’s meant to meet his MagiPolícia counterpart, who will take him to Draco. He breathes in the warm air and looks around.

There’s plenty of little shop fronts and cafés with seating outside fully decked out for Christmas. Flashing lights, Christmas trees with all manner of colourful baubles and ornaments, big paper stars dangling in windows and bright red Santa figurines waving and watching him from everywhere. He can’t help but feel like it’s all a little out of place. He’s used to this amount of aggressive festive feeling. He’s been dragged around London by Hermione enough times that he knows it way too well. It almost reminds him of last year, when both Harry and Ron had been persuaded into a trip to London to _“look at the lights”_ only to end up in Harrods for longer than it should be legal. The lights _were_ pretty, though. And so are some of these over the buildings in the centre of Fortaleza.

The feeling that something is off doesn’t ease, but he knows it’s most likely because his brain is convinced that Christmas decorations are directly linked to the cold, the wind, and the rain. It may also have something to do with the creepy inflatable snowman staring at him from a florist at the end of the street. _His top hat and carrot nose_ definitely don’t belong here.

It’s hard to ignore the apprehension, the overwhelming sense of dread, but there is something to be said for the power of simple things like chatter and laughter and sunshine. And there seems to be plenty of that around here to give Harry a little joy. To ease his discontent about _why_ he’s here.

He’s always wanted to come to Brazil, although he’d imagined the circumstance would be much better than it is. He’d pictured sunshine, hammocks, sandy dunes and coconut water and not even a tiny little bit of breaking a curse no one had ever heard of and bringing Draco Malfoy, the Department of Mysteries’ most loved son, back home.

He meets Marcos, a sergeant for the National Wizarding Public Security Force (affectionately known as the MagiPolícia, which he loves to say but has a feeling he’s absolutely butchering the pronunciation when he does, judging by the look Marcos gives him) and lets himself be escorted into a car and enveloped by small talk and pleasantries.

It’s all very fine and dandy but it’s too bloody hot for December and Draco Malfoy is in a small resort unconscious for most of the day and he has to save him. _No biggie. All good. Not a problem in the world. At. All._

He sits in the car and thinks about Draco. _No. Not like that_ , he has to remind his brain. He doesn’t have the time to consider his feelings right now. He’s here to save some lives and bring Draco home. 

Their history hadn’t stopped him from acting normal around Draco and even solving a case or two together. It hadn’t stopped him from being rational (or as rational as he’d ever been) and doing things properly. Harry’s little Draco-shaped problem really only came out at night when Harry was wrapped around some random blonde in the corner of a Muggle club, or when he went to bed at night and the memories of Malfoy’s filthy mouth came back, no matter how hard he tried to stop them.

None of it mattered. Harry’s… _unimportant personal_ _issue_ had no place here. He was here to figure out how to stop a curse, bring Draco Malfoy home and take that weeks-long paid holiday he would wrangle out of Robards and Kingsley as soon as he got back to the office. He just had to keep telling himself that.

Marcos seems like a good chap. Sort of reminds him of Ron, if Ron was a dark-haired, tanned Brazilian man. Cheery, talking animatedly as he drives Harry out of the city towards the fancy beach resort, pointing out good places to eat or grab a drink, as if he’s nothing but a taxi driver and Harry’s just a tourist. _As if Harry isn’t here to save the life that’s most precious to him in the whole world._

Harry casts a mean cooling charm but realises quickly that even his cooling charms aren’t quite what one needs in a Brazilian December climate. There’s simply not much he can do about the humidity, so he’ll just have to take deep breaths and deal with it. At least his sweaty disgruntled looks will easily reflect how grim he feels inside. It’s only fair.

Marcos shows him around the Muggle part of the hotel (“luckily the curse didn’t spread this far and we’ve been able to shut off the wizarding side so there’s no contact at all”), and Harry lets himself daydream for a little at the sight of inviting enormous pools with little deck chairs around them and a bar covered in tan women and men in small swimsuits.

_Focus, Harry, focus._

Marcos makes a point of explaining very little about the case (“you’re only meant to settle in and get a good night’s sleep, Auror Potter, the time difference is no joke”), and takes him down the corridor all the way to his suite while pointing at several doors on the way there explaining if there’s a police officer or a victim in it. Anyone that didn’t show symptoms of the curse by the time the situation got escalated to the police was safely evacuated so the building is now only filled with people either suffering from the curse or working to break it. 

It is gorgeous. He doesn’t want to notice, but it is. They give Harry a spacious suite with its own little balcony, complete with a tiny pool. When his eyes fall on it, he decides he’s getting himself a hammock for the garden in Grimmauld Place as soon as he’s back home — sod everyone that put him off the idea. Even if he only gets one day of sunshine and enough heat to warrant bringing it out, it’ll be worth it.

Marcos shows him around the rest of this side of the resort, the shared spaces, (not really in use at the moment _for obvious reasons_ ), the restaurant (“not in use either, we’re getting all meals except breakfast delivered to our rooms considering the situation, I’ll leave you a menu later so you can pick what you want for tomorrow”). 

Harry takes an immediate liking to Marcos. There’s a palpable tension in the building, a striking silence with a soft low murmur behind, like a nearly empty church where the only sounds are footsteps against old stone and the echo of voices fervently praying the rosary. But Marcos is jolly and nice and does everything to put Harry at ease and make him comfortable. Harry doesn’t think he will be comfortable until he’s out of this place, but he appreciates the effort nonetheless. Concepts like “having a soak in the pool,” “reading a book on the balcony,” or “taking days off” seem abstract as they walk past closed doors he knows probably house bedridden curse victims.

Marcos is adamant that they will talk no work today and will meet first thing after breakfast for briefing and scheduling, where Harry will have a chance to meet everyone involved in the case — law enforcement and healers alike — and get to work. Until then, he’s instructed to rest and try to enjoy his last day of freedom while he can.

He knows he shouldn't — jet lag will be a bitch in the morning — but the bed, in his heavily air conditioned room, looks incredibly inviting and he can’t help it, he just can’t.

He has a fitful few hours of sleep and wakes up to find a sandwich, a small salad, mouth-watering cut up pieces of fruit in a cup and a drink on a small tray by his door. He is starving and seeing fresh food is a relief after the habits he returns to when he’s on missions back home.

He takes the tray outside and eats slowly, letting the early evening breeze tickle his hair softly, trying to ignore the heavy feeling in his chest.

He goes to bed after dinner and a quick shower. There’s no point faffing about wondering what he knows or doesn’t know. If he sleeps the whole night through, it won’t be long until he’s all briefed and he can get to work.

Sleep doesn’t come easy this time, though. The weight in his chest gets heavier and heavier and he can’t stop thinking, wondering if Draco is in one of those rooms he has walked past, with their closed doors and the indiscernible whispers. If Draco is just a few steps away as he sleeps, for the first time in years.


	4. Fourth of December

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I know I've been teasing you all to near-death with snippets of out-of-context situations so hopefully this chapter will answer some of the questions... while maybe simultaneously asking even more questions? Sorry???

Harry wakes up feeling refreshed, for once. With plenty of time to spare, which is unusual too. So he lets himself sink back into the soft cotton. There is a distinct feeling, either in the texture of the sheets or the feel of the mattress or the faint floral scent of the laundry detergent, that makes him think of Pansy. 

And doesn’t that open a can of worms he’s not willing to lose himself in, especially if he’s meaning to focus on what’s important today.

_After all, it had started one night after one of Pansy’s “low key get togethers” which was apparently Parkinson code for a fucking wild party. They all left Hogwarts after their repeat year a few months before and he still wasn’t sure how they’d all clicked so seamlessly. It sort of made sense in its unique, fucked up way._

_Malfoy’s snarky banter was a match for Ron’s jokes; Pansy’s self-deprecating humour was a match for Harry’s gloom; Blaise’s natural curiosity was a match for Hermione’s thirst for knowledge. It helped that Blaise had gotten dragged along into Ginny and Luna’s bed one night and clearly did not mind the sharing. It had made sense that Greg Goyle, as it turns out, had a personality of his own and was incredibly funny — which meant that, after the Thomas/Finnigan/Goyle alliance was formed, mischief and riotous laughter were guaranteed at any and every occasion._

_Neville and Theo were clearly orbiting around each other too, though not quite daring to touch just yet. Millie and the Patils had, too, formed an alliance, only this one was based on the consumption of tea and biscuits and the practice of Divination and Astrology. To be absolutely fair, all the way back then there was also something going on with Pansy, Ron and Hermione that made Harry a little ill when he thought of it, so he tries not to. His point is, post Eighth Year life featured a lot more Slytherins than Harry had imagined it would. It wasn’t a bad thing._

_Harry’s brain always goes on this long journey to avoid the facts. The hard truth being, it was one night after one of Pansy’s “low key get togethers” that had changed his life forever._

_Draco, Pansy and Blaise had bought this enormous duplex apartment down in Muggle London and it had become the epicentre of everything. There was always someone around — Harry was really the only one with a steady job at the time and that was only because they’d fast tracked him through Auror training with dozens of pieces of paperwork that had words like “wartime contributions” and “valiant conduct” on them. It all made him a little sick._

_The Slytherins were just floating about in their abundance of wealth, but doing very little else, as they weren’t exactly welcome within their families or the general wizarding population. Hermione was drowning her failed attempts at recovering her parent’s memories in uni work, Ron was drowning his mourning in ridiculous Weasley’s Wheezes product ideas. Everyone was just a little lost, the way Harry supposes anyone is when they leave school and are meant to become an adult. For them, it just had an extra sprinkle of trauma and grief._

_On the night that changed everything, he’d snuck out of the giant living room and half hugged a drunk Pansy standing by the kitchen island with a “I think I’m gonna head out now.” The answer was the same as always._

_“Harry, no.”_

_“I have a job, Pansy.”_

_“Yes, yes, Mr. Important. We know. Take the spare bedroom? Please? At least we can all have breakfast together?”_

_And he knows he can’t fight her when she’s like this, half drunk and uncharacteristically honest. The last time he did try to explain he really actually had to go home, her eyes had filled rapidly with tears and she’d said, voice tight, “I just miss hanging out with you, is all. I told you it would all change after Hogwarts,” and he does not want a repeat of that feeling._

_“Second door on the left upstairs?”_

_“Yes, Auror Potter, sir!” she says, with a mock salute that makes him want to smack her._

_He turns to leave and stops by the door. He very rarely says it, but the words are out before he can do anything about it, feeling stupid as soon as her eyes light up in a both confused and ecstatic expression. “I love you, Pans.”_

_And he puts himself to bed trying not to think about emotional vulnerability and platonic love. He’s not as drunk as everyone else downstairs, but it’s obviously enough to make him overthink small things. Love, platonic or otherwise, still feels like a foreign feeling. Something he’s not worthy of._

_He doesn’t know how long it is until the door to his bedroom slams open, but he doesn’t feel very well rested at all and it’s pitch black outside, so he reckons he's not been asleep for even two hours when it happens._

_“Pansy, you cow. You left me!” Draco is absolutely wankered and apparently convinced he is in Pansy’ room. Harry is trying to find the words to say, “Malfoy, get your drunk arse out of here,” or, “I really need to sleep, why won’t anyone let me sleep,” or maybe even, “Pansy is not here, Draco, get the fuck out,” but the words dissolve on his tongue like candy floss. Draco is making quick progress of undressing himself. Harry is grateful he can’t see, but even just hearing it, knowing it is happening makes heat rise to his face._

_He feels the cold hit his body first, as he registers that Draco has walked around to the other side of the bed, lifted the duvet and is currently getting into bed with Harry._

_Fully naked._

_He throws a leg over Harry’s hip, an arm over Harry’s chest and snuggles into him. “Hmmm. S’warm,” he mumbles against Harry’s neck. “Soft,” he continues to describe this awkward cuddle Harry doesn’t know how to stop. “Love you, Pans,” he says, then — an echo of Harry’s words on the kitchen doorway a few hours earlier, looking at a flushed Pansy Parkison._

He didn’t know then how easily he’d get used to sleeping with Draco Malfoy wrapped around him, practically purring. He didn’t know then how much he’d miss it all four years later.

Needless to say, it’s a bittersweet memory that keeps playing in his head for the rest of the day. 

He is both frustrated and impressed at how organised the Brazilian police force is. He sits through hours upon hours of victim files, notes on possible curses, witness statements. They have boards up with names and dates and locations and pictures and, if Harry is being honest, it reminds him of those crime shows Hermione and Theo were obsessed with watching on the telly years ago.

Harry can feel the itch under his skin; Hermione calls it Field-Auror-Harry-Who-Can’t-Sit-His-Arse-Down. He just can’t help but feel like sharing lunch with the other officers, meeting the healers, and spending another few hours making schedules _(he still can’t believe they will make him take days off, that is not how urgent missions work)_ is a little bit of a waste of time.It takes them several hours to get to the point where they can finally discuss ideas of how Harry wants to go about it. There are a few things they haven’t tried to look for yet that Harry wants to try as soon as he can see the victims and look at crime locations. He has to discreetly take deep breaths every once in a while to remind himself he is just an Auror here, a foreign one at that, and that it won’t do to lose his temper. It’s only a minor setback, sitting in this stupid conference room for a whole day wasting crucial time. He’ll get to see _the victims_ tomorrow and get to work.

It all seems rather pointless until he sees Draco — and the need to see him is only getting more and more desperate by the minute, especially after hearing the particulars of how much some of the curse victims are suffering.

He shouldn’t, he really shouldn’t, but that night, he thinks of home and of his family, the Weasleys, Ron and Hermione and Rosie and Hermione’s little bump. He thinks of Teddy. He thinks of Pansy, and Blaise, and Theo, and Greg, and Millie. How much he misses them all and wishes things hadn’t gone the way they did. He thinks of the nearly-empty box he took back to the attic, the silver bauble wrapped in newspaper rolling around from one end to the other. The strings of colourful lights that flashed red, then green, then blue then red again while watching him as Harry tried to _not think about it_ and failed miserably. 

With only a pang of guilt, he inhales deeply for that fresh laundry scent, rubs the bedsheet softly between his index fingers and his thumbs and he thinks of Draco’s warm body and his spicy cologne and how the dip between his waist and hip had the softest little bit of skin.


	5. Fifth of December

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Enter: The Character We've All Been Waiting For]
> 
> Also, finally, a first look at the curse!

Harry decides to unpack properly on the second morning he wakes up in Brazil. He didn’t want to do it, thinking unpacking meant that he was accepting that this may take more than a couple days. But the truth is, he already knows this will probably take a lot longer than a week, so there’s no point delaying the inevitable. Future Harry will thank him for doing it this early.

He opens his suitcase and gets to work on pulling rolled t-shirt after rolled t-shirt, piles of shorts, one or two hoodies and a random assortment of pants and socks. His toiletries are out in the bathroom already and he didn’t bring much in terms of personal items. 

The only thing he takes with him whenever he is away from home for longer than one night is wrapped in one of his t-shirts: a gold picture frame so small that it fits in the palm of his hand. It’s clipped shut, but when he opens it, it becomes twice has large and on one side, there’s a picture of Teddy trying to hop on a broom, falling and laughing, and on the other side there’s baby Rose dressed in a mustard yellow corduroy dress Harry bought for her when she was born, propped against a ton of pillows on Hermione and Ron’s bed. She’s sucking on her thumb and smiling. Beside her, against the headboard there are two decorative cushions that read “Brrrrr… Wake me up when winter ends” and Harry, despite everything, finds himself chuckling because he knows those are one of Ron’s favourite buys and that Hermione is probably still attempting to find a way to set them on fire without making Ron suspicious.

After breakfast, Harry sits in the conference room and his brain insists on slipping in and out of his body at random intervals of time. He takes a deep breath and lets it go, then does it again, then lets it go. He thinks of Hermione’s voice, but he knows she’s never as efficient as the voice he wants to talk him through his rage. He wants Pansy’s voice. He wants Pansy to say “count to five, come on, you idiot, one, two, three, four, five, exhale” but that all went to shit years ago.

By the time lunch comes around, he’s made his mind up and rehearsed his little speech silently inside his mind a million times. It’s really not his fault that it comes out as a slightly sharp: “Right, you’re very organised here, but I think I’m going to have to go see the victims, ask some questions and try some diagnostic spells.” He manages to bite his tongue just enough not to finish his sentence with, “if I want to be home for Christmas,” and decides that’s enough of a victory.

It’s Marcos’ day off so it’s an older officer, Marília, that takes him up to the rooms. She has a kind smile and that lovely sing-song accent that he’s starting to love. _Maybe he’ll learn Brazilian Portuguese, after this. That would give him something to do with his life,_ he thinks.

When they get to the top floor, Marília opens the first door on the right on the same corridor as his own room and says, quietly: “This was our first curse victim, I think you know each other? We were told he works for your Ministry.”

Harry walks into the room and— _fuck, it really is Draco._ He realises right there and then that a part of him hadn’t fully believed it would be Draco. Part of him thought that maybe all of this was some kind of odd prank. But there he is, and it really can’t be anyone else — _there is no one in this world that looks like Draco._

He’s asleep, his head and shoulders supported by several crisp white pillows. It steals the breath straight out of Harry’s lungs to see him. 

Harry knows exactly what he’s looking for so he tries not to dawdle. It helps that Draco isn’t awake, even if it hurts more. “He acts very haughty and has been adamant he is perfectly fine, according to the Healers,” they’d told Harry, which he found hilarious coming from total strangers. But Draco is asleep and his eyes are twitching under the lids, his fingers jerking of their own accord against his body, his breath coming out in sharp, small gasps.

Harry gets closer to the bed and grabs his wand from its holster, musing what to do first. It’s hard to focus, not only because Draco is visibly in pain and he knows he can’t do anything about it, but also because he hasn’t been this close to Draco since the bauble incident, four years prior.

They’d managed to keep their distance as much as possible when they were put on cases together, but now… Harry could just reach out and touch him, if he wanted.

Well, he can’t. Because of the curse — they’re still convinced the curse can be passed through touch. But, _hypothetically_. They’re close enough to touch.

Harry thinks of his heart as if it was one of his baking dishes where he accidentally cooks dinner for ten, because he still hasn’t learnt that it’s _always just him._ So he makes enough dinner for a quidditch team and has his portion for the night. The next day, when he puts it in the oven to warm it up again, the empty square where his first portion was scooped out from sits there - blackened and burnt. And it stays that way for days and days, each small square getting darker and darker as he warms up his food again and again and again, until there’s no more and he accidentally cooks for ten again.

That’s how his heart feels: like he keeps getting it burnt on the exact same spot because he’s not sure yet if he can let go. If he should just transfer whatever amount of food he wants that day into a small dish.

So he approaches Draco with a blackened and burnt heart but his head held high — the last thing he wants is for the Brazilian officers _to know._

He starts small, repeating the diagnostic and healing spells he knows have been used already by the Brazilian team — but it’s one thing hearing about it, one thing reading about it in a file. It’s a completely different thing to see the waves, the colours, the readings through his own eyes. Magic is intuitive, it is _feeling_. And Harry needs to know what happened to Draco to know what happened to everyone else.

From what they know, Draco was by himself in his room reading Dostoevsky’s _Crime and Punishment_. If they can trust his word, he was alone in his room all day that day except for breakfast, which he took on the main restaurant downstairs. 

So, even though Harry has now sat through a twenty minute briefing back home and a twelve hour briefing across two days here, they have very nearly nothing to go on. Their two biggest concerns currently are the suspicion that the curse is passed from person to person by touch and the fact that the victims can’t seem to be able to talk about their affliction at all. They can complain vaguely about how they’re feeling, or what they were up to when the curse first hit. But they can’t speak of the curse itself, at all. So statements are scarce and vague and they have no evidence or clues to help them in their quest to 1) figure out what the curse is, and 2) figure out who cast it in the first place.

He lies in bed that night, questions swimming in his head: who had cursed Draco and why? Why Draco and why this curse no one has ever heard of? What’s their goal? Was it really just the fact that he was a foreigner in an expensive resort? Or was it that he was a Malfoy? Had someone really come all the way across an ocean to curse Draco Malfoy? It seemed like too much of a coincidence to go with the first option, and yet… none of it made sense.

He wills his brain not to, but he also wonders whether or not Draco still looks at life like it’s a miracle that he gets to live it. If he still does things on impulse, if he still smiles and the whole world falls on their knees. If Draco Malfoy’s mere presence is magnetic like it used to be.


	6. Sixth of December

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short and sweet (as sweet as possible given dear Harry's current predicament) one for you all on this lovely Sunday 🎄

A part of him is enamoured of this place, now that his body is a little more used to the heat and the humidity. In a way, it’s a similar feeling to how he felt about Grimmauld Place when he first moved in, after the war. The house recognised him, felt good, started taking on changes all by itself, keeping the rooms free of dust, the furniture polished, the curtains wide open so the sun could shine through. But it was still tainted. It still smelled of evil, Regulus’ old room still gave him shivers when he walked past the door. Sirius’ old room still broke his heart.

This place was a little like that. If he wasn’t here for work, if he didn’t have to see people — Draco — suffering, he would probably enjoy it very, very much. 

His bedroom has a tiny christmas tree that brings him joy and painful memories in equal amounts and on the table, by a bowl of hard fruity sweets, there’s a small nativity scene carved in wood and a colourful painted nutcracker that watches Harry as if he knows something he's not meant to. If he focuses really hard, he almost believes, for a second, that he’s just on holiday. Just experimenting what Christmas is like in the heat. Trying something new. Some nonsense like that. Alas, that isn’t what he is here for. 

He’s getting used to the lack of uniform, still, but he hadn’t dared bring robes, knowing how hot and uncomfortable he would be. So he wears shorts and a t-shirt paired with his beat-up running trainers, and tries not to think about how odd it is to put his wand holster over his shorts, strapped tightly against his thigh where he knows he can reach for it in half a second.

Draco is awake when Harry walks into his room after breakfast, and Harry loses the ground under his feet for a short moment. 

“Auror Potter. I did wonder who they’d send to save me,” Draco says in a slow, arrogant, one hundred percent Malfoy drawl, accentuated by a roll of his eyes. 

“Err… hello,” Harry says because he really doesn’t know what else to say. _I have thought of you every night since you left_ seems a bit excessive.

“Yes. Unsp- Malfoy. Hello.” It isn’t remarkably better, but he’s said something more than “err, hello” so he’ll go with it. “How are you feeling today?”

“Quite wonderful, thank you. I thought I could go for a little swim today, but that lady in the corner insists the heat outside won’t do me any good. Do you know what that is about, Potter?”

Harry shares an awkward smile with the Healer who’s sitting in the corner, looking at a chart of what he would guess is Draco’s rapid decline in the past few days. 

His brain, however, is focused on just one word Draco has said.

_Potter._ He wishes the way Draco says it didn’t bring to the surface too many memories, but his heart is leaping about in his chest before he even realises why it affects him so much.

_Potter._ It shouldn’t be more than his last name. A name he has almost no connection to, but that the world deems so very important. And yet, _Potter_ in Draco’s lips is much more than that.

_Potter._ It’s a strand of hair being tucked behind his ear, it’s a wink behind Blaise’s back, it’s a smirk over a spilling pint, it’s a playful nip to his earlobe, a hand wrapping itself around his. It’s being hugged from behind while he’s cooking, it’s a kiss on the forehead when he gets in bed, it’s a warm body curling around his and words of affection whispered against his hair.

_“Harry. It’s not healthy. It’s been three years, mate, you have to let it go.” “Oh, fuck you, Ron. You do it, if it’s so easy.” “Harry, Ron is only trying t—” “I know, I know, I’m sorry, ‘Mione.”_

“Right. So. Wanna tell me what you know?” Harry says, as casually as possible.

“Potter.” God, will he please stop saying it, for fuck’s sake. “I have done a million times, to what feels like at least ten different people now.”

“Well, they’re not me,” he says, matter of factly, wondering where his courage came from. 

Surprisingly, Draco does. Harry writes it all down in his tiny notebook but it’s nothing that he doesn’t already know. No matter what he asks, how precise, how specific he is — Draco really can’t tell him anything about the curse.

It’s frustrating but not surprising. He knew this, even if a (very mean) part of him thought maybe he would solve it all, just because it was him.

“Do you mind me running some diagnostic spells on you?”

“Well, that’s been done too, Potter.”

_Potter._ He was always Potter, except for in bed. _Potter._ “I slept naked next to you, Potter, the least you could do is buy me coffee.” _Potter._ “Come on, Potter, keep up, what’s the point of dating someone as beautiful as me if you are this bad at dancing?” _Potter._ “Oh, Jesus Christ, Potter, stop weeping, it’s not like this changes anything. It certainly doesn’t get rid of my unfortunate tattoo. It’s just… a job. A very secret job you can’t tell anyone about.” _Potter._ “I can’t do this anymore, Potter. Robards is making a fucking slave out of you and you’re letting him.”

_Fuck._

“Do you mind?”

“No, that’ll be fine.”

Harry runs his diagnostics, his heart beating stupidly in his chest. There are things that read… familiar, if _confusing._ Things that shouldn’t be lighting up the way they are. Not from the same spell. Not even from a spell — but a potion.

“Drac— Malfoy. You can’t bloody answer me, can you? Fuck. Did someone give you a potion? Is this a potion? This reads like a potion. No one said anything about a potion!!”

But Draco can’t bloody answer him, so he marches down to the conference room to catch one of the Brazilian officers and try not to shout as he asks why no one has said anything about it potentially being a potion and not an hex or curse.

He runs the same diagnostics on the other victims: Sam and Kevin, the American couple in the room next to Draco’s; Beatriz, the maid; Zeca, the waiter; Eulália, the old widow in the room at the end of hall; and António, the first officer to respond to the hotel’s call of distress.

They all read exactly the same, just less intense. The reading is definitely stronger on Draco and he doesn’t know what to make of it. Is it because he was the first one to be cursed? Or is it because it was _meant for him?_

None of it makes sense. Not one thing. But, even surrounded by a team, he feels like it’s all in his hands now.


	7. Seventh of December

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Popping in real quick to drop some more angsty flashbacks and an increasingly distressed Harry. Nothing new, really.
> 
> (I have been having trouble focusing the past few days and parts of this chapter are un-betaed, so forgive any typos or general grammatical stupidity!)

He gets paired with a young Brazilian officer he thinks is called Isaac the morning of his fourth day in Brazil. He knows it’s bad form, but he’s still getting his head around the place and learning everyone’s names. He’s usually really good at it but nothing about the situation he finds himself in is usual.

He overdoes it on the coffee at breakfast and feels a little on edge for the whole morning. It had seemed like the only solution after a rough night of struggling to fall asleep, his mind overflowing with images of Draco, every thought a concealed landmine of memories.

The Birthday Incident of 2003 seemed to have been his brain’s pick last night. At that point, it would be a whole six months until Draco left, but it had been the first of Harry’s many, many fuck-ups. 

_Harry is late to Draco’s birthday dinner. Pansy opens the door and gives him a look that may as well be an AK. Blaise mutters something that he can tell isn’t nice when he walks into the dining/living room with his tail between his legs, bouquet of flowers first as if that can make up for his mistakes. Theo finally breaks the silence with a “fucking finally” and Harry would let the ground swallow him if he could._

_“Theo, don’t be rude. I suppose I knew what I was getting into when I started dating the only Auror in the whole of the DMLE. He’s got his hands full, you know. Dessert, babe? We were just finishing.”_

_Draco calls him ‘baby’. Babe is not good._

_No one says anything else. Seamus and Dean aren’t present to save it all with an actual joke, so Ron wearily drags the conversation towards Quidditch. But Harry knows he’s fucked up and that he won’t hear the end of it later that day. And it seems everyone else at the table knows, too._

The man he’s decided is named Isaac until further information is available is quiet but clearly very good at his job. Harry, with his bone deep dislike of paperwork, appreciates the organisation and dedication of the Brazilian office. Everyone seems perfectly at peace with the balance of bureaucracy and field work and Harry thinks maybe he can learn from them, take something back to the Ministry. He’s already pretty sure he will be returning with _no ego and no heart_ , so he may as well strive to bring something good and useful back.

They spend the morning talking to the healers, pushing for any minor detail, any seemingly unconnected symptom that could lead them to the cause, to an answer. They sit with Marcos and Marília at lunch and go over their collective notes as they eat. 

It rubs Harry entirely the wrong way when Marília asks him if he’s close with Draco. He knows she means well, she’s just making conversation, but, well, it _stings_ a little. He’s managed to hide a relationship for practically ten months and a breakup for a whole four years at the Ministry back home, he’s not about to blow it overseas.

“Not really, no. I do see him around, sometimes. But we’re in very different departments at the Ministry,” he says. _Every day, there is a nasty breakup with no sense of closure and 9 stops of the Ministry lifts between us,_ is what he doesn’t say.

“Oh, that makes sense,” says probably-Isaac. But Marília is more insistent than he would have expected: “Oh, it must be awful anyway, though. Even if you’re not friends. Having to see someone you know and work with like that.”

Harry’s lunch is suddenly not settling that well in his stomach. “It is, yeah.” He nods. “Awful.”

He escapes to his room shortly after that, just in case the conversation has any chance to progress and tries to use the few minutes he has left before resuming work wisely. Well… wisely is not the right word, really. He tries not to overthink it as he pokes his wand at the jacket he was wearing the morning he arrived by Portkey and, voilá, _there they are_. An almost full pack of cigarettes.

Harry doesn’t smoke. “Not really,” is what he’d say if anyone asked. But sometimes nothing else will fill _that_ void and he’s realised quite recently after one too many long missions that there is no point just sitting with that craving. If Voldemort didn’t kill him, smoking surely won’t be his demise.

He sits on the balcony and lights the cigarette, with an odd mix of feelings settling in his chest immediately. Relief, first. And then, strangely, the unsettling sensation that he’s being watched. He knows he isn’t — can’t be. But it’s something he felt before, many times. It reminds him too much of cold nights in a tent, holding Hermione’s hand. Or of his first few months living in Grimmauld Place after the war, when Kreacher was still there, hiding behind old pieces of furniture, watching Harry and muttering to himself under his breath. Harry feels it in such an intense way, it may as well be the wooden nutcracker on the table in his suite that’s keeping an eye on him. Deep down he knows no one is watching him, except for the Draco in his memories, who follows him around like a ghost. Draco never did approve of his smoking.

The afternoon goes pretty similarly to the morning, except Harry is in a much worse mood, which helps no one. 

He gets to speak with the American couple this time. Sam and Kevin are in their sixties and usually come to Brazil for Christmas since they became empty nesters, nearly seven years ago now. Their children are scattered around the U.S.A. and don’t have time to come home for Christmas, so they’ve created their own little tradition. Harry bitterly thinks of how much he’d like to have parents to go home to at Christmas. His brain bites back with a memory of Molly and Arthur in their Weasley jumpers and he feels the taste of bile rise up in his throat. Maybe, if he can solve this, he can see _his parents_ this Christmas.

As it was expected, Sam and Kevin have no answers and cleverly run their answers around the curse. It’s almost like an anti-Veritaserum in the sense that instead of feeling the urge to spill the truth, as soon as you get to the subject you were asked about, your brain can’t go on. 

He wonders if that is the potion part of this. Could something like that exist? A forced vow of secrecy, almost?

As much as his brain is stuck on Draco, it does prove helpful to talk with the other victims and not just read information from a file. Harry doesn’t want to ask outright — he’s a selfish bastard with tunnel vision, but there’s no point being rude — so he corners Sam and Kevin’s nurse later that night and asks if age has any impact on their situation. You’d think a curse that is affecting a very healthy looking Draco Malfoy severely would be much worse on a couple of sixty year old people, but apparently there are no differences to how the curse acts on any of the victims, at least none that the Healers have found. 

Before he gets in bed that night, he writes a few new notes for himself to look over the next day. He’ll have to figure out who on the Brazilian force is the potions expert — he’s well aware that is his weakness and he’s convinced he will need a round knowledge of most things to crack this curse down the middle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is definitely my most... tenuous use of a daily prompt so far. Kreacher looks disturbingly creepy and I quite honestly didn't know what to do with him lmao


	8. Eighth of December

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know, we all want to wrap Harry up in a blankie and make him a cuppa. I'm afraid it's not quite time for that yet, but I am giving you a fair chunk of flashbacks on this one that hopefully serve to sate your curiosity a little!

Harry is up at five in the morning and can’t manage to go back to sleep, no matter how hard he tries. It’s almost six when he slips into his trainers, a pair of shorts and yesterday’s t-shirt and does lap after lap after lap around the resort building.

Draco may as well be running right next to Harry, for how clear he hears his voice in his head:

_“Harry, please. You need a day off. I’m not asking you to do anything but rest. This is for you. I know you don’t see it but it’s because I care about you.”_

He runs down the driveway and does a sharp right. It’s an odd track, but it works. The temperature, at least, is bearable since it’s still dark. The quiet is his friend.

_Draco looks haggard, Harry has never seen him look so undone, so untidy. He bursts into the room and lets out a sigh of relief upon seeing Harry. Or at least Harry thinks it’s relief. “I thought—”_

_“It’s no biggie, love. They’ve patched me all up.”_

_“Ronald has just knocked on my door covered in your blood and said there was A HOLE IN YOUR CHEST, HARRY. You don’t get to tell me ‘it’s no biggie,’ you arsehole.”_

He goes up by the right side of the house where the kitchens and the breakfast room are, by the bushes covered in tiny little periwinkle flowers. Then through the back and around the pool, through the tall trees.

_“Hey, I was thinking I could try and book for that Vietnamese restaurant you like next weekend?” Harry says into Draco’s neck. They’re wrapped around each other on the sofa. “Don’t bother,” Draco says and, unfortunately, Harry knows what he’s not saying. “You’ll be late anyway. Or you won’t make it, at all.”_

He comes back through the other side of the house, where his room is, runs right past the tree he can see from his balcony and tries not to think about how Draco would see it from his balcony too, if he could go on his balcony.

_“Harry, I don’t want this to be a problem, but you need to listen to me. It’s been five years since the war. You can’t let Robards and Kingsley push you around and use you as their poster boy for everything. You need to rest.”_

_“Fuck, I know. But it’s not exactly like I can say no. It’s my job, Draco.”_

_“It is not!”_

_“You’ll see. You’ve just started at the Ministry. Give it another couple of months and you’ll get it.”_

_And that had been his mistake. Because Draco worked hard down in Mysteries, but he was always home on time. And he never missed any occasion. Never forgot anything important._

And he’s back in front of the house and goes again without so much as a look at the door. He runs until he’s weak, until he feels like he may be sick — he’s not sure that’s entirely from the running — until his shins are killing him and his thighs are burning. Until the sun starts to come up in the sky and Harry decides it’s time to hop in the shower and get ready for another day of grasping at straws.

_“Potter, I need you to teach me how to produce a corporeal Patronus.” Harry’s eyes very nearly pop out of his skull with shock when he hears Draco’s words._

_“Malfoy, you can’t be serious.” He’d offered everyone back at Hogwarts, taught most of the Slytherins in Eighth Year, in fact._

_“I… look, I have gotten an interview for a rather prestigious job and I know I won’t get it if I can’t do a proper Patronus.”_

_It only took a couple of weeks and Harry was ecstatic when Draco finally managed it. Harry only realised after that he’d miss their training sessions, but most of all, he’d miss the way Draco’s eyes would shine bright every time Harry’s stag trotted around them._

When he gets into bed that night — a whopping 18 hours after he left it — he deeply regrets his early run and wishes it _had_ been another day of grasping at straws instead of the utter mess it was.

Draco had only been awake for about two hours throughout the whole day, and according to his Healer, wasn’t very lucid at all, even for those two hours. “He didn’t sound remotely arrogant,” she said, as if it was a joke. 

_He’s not. I know I can’t make you believe me, but he’s not. He’s actually the sweetest man you’ll ever meet,_ he thinks, but laughs instead.What else is he meant to do?

By lunch, all hell breaks loose. One of the healers becomes victim number eight after accidentally brushing hands with Beatriz, victim number four. 

So, instead of attempting to fix the problem at hand, they have an eighth victim and have a second time-wasting meeting about how to proceed and how to be even more careful to avoid touching the victims.

Harry has seen plenty of weird cases since he first joined the Aurors but this — even without the Draco part of it — has to take the fucking cake. The idea that, slowly, they’ll all be victims in this house if they’re not careful enough fills him with dread and fear and chills him to the bone.

He peers into his pack of Marlboro Reds and realises there are a lot of cigarettes missing already compared to the day before. He’s isn’t sure if it is the added stress or because of the proximity to Draco, but, at the end of the day, it’s just a coping mechanism, probably healthier than many of the ones he falls back onto when he’s home. At least he’s eating properly, here. Either way, it’s not ideal, and the more he thinks about it the more uneasy he feels.

If Harry’s lack of spine when it came to work had been the number one reason for disagreements between Draco and him, his habit had definitely been second.

He writes a letter to Hermione and Ron when he finally manages to get to his room, way later than the past few days. This case is finally starting to feel like a case. Like a mission. And yet, it’s nothing like he’s ever experienced before. He gives up on the letter halfway through, both from exhaustion and the fact that he doesn’t know what to say. 

“Hey guys, so I’m not really supposed to tell you but remember that ex of mine that we were all friends with and then everything went to shit? He’s actually dying in Brazil and that’s why they sent me here?” 

“Hey guys, do you miss Pansy and Blaise? Do you miss Theo’s brownies? Do you miss Greg’s jokes? Because I do. I’m sorry it’s my fault none of us hang out anymore.” 

“Hey guys, I miss you. I’m sorry I’m not a great company to be around anymore.” 

“Hey guys, I love you but I am so jealous of you and your little perfect family and it makes me feel very bitter and ashamed.”

_Fuck._


	9. Ninth of December

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It is Christmas so ask and you shall receive... here's some more Pansy for you! And Harry has an introspective moment... again.

He isn’t happy that they have a new victim, but it does allow for a close look at what the early stages of the curse look like and how much difference there is between their newly-cursed victim and Draco, who, for all intents and purposes, is their Patient 0.

Harry is the first one in the newest victim’s room in the morning, and he’s the first one in there again after lunch. Harry does every diagnostic spell twice, and checks his notes for what is different and what isn’t. He gets the healers to use a Gemino charm on every chart, note or file they have on the patients since they’ve arrived so he can look at them later and compare everything.

The most obvious point of comparison is how _perky_ Healer Dias is. It’s clear he tries to talk about the curse a lot — probably wanting to help — and gets told off several times by his peers who are now looking after him. 

Harry can’t get anything further than “she dropped her fork, so I went to pick it up for her and our hands brushed…” — the thought seems to vanish completely as soon as Healer Dias gets to that crucial bit of information.

Apart from the Healer, all other victims remain unconscious for the entirety of the morning, so Harry and the four Brazilian officers on duty that day retreat to the conference room downstairs to look through each other’s notes and bounce ideas off each other.

The morale has dipped dramatically since Harry arrived. It’s both comforting and terrifying to find out he isn’t the only one who feels like they’re getting nowhere with their investigation.

The more Harry thinks about the _contagious-by-direct-contact_ factor _,_ the more frustrated he gets. They don’t know how exactly it happened with many of the victims they currently have. The frustration and the anger all come down, every day, to how little they actually know about what’s going on and how there is, seemingly, very little way to get any more information.

He isn’t a studious type at all, but he finds himself wishing he still had access to the Ministry library, or Hermione’s brain. Whenever he was stuck on a case he’d discuss it with Hermione and, even when she didn’t come up with a solution, it helped to just have her organised, streamlined thoughts to pick things up from. But he couldn’t. It was too risky.

Harry regrets how hard he tries not to think about Draco, as it only gives his brain an excuse to find more creative ways of torturing him. Like making him think of Pansy and the other Slytherins. 

There had been a time, back in Eighth Year where Pansy had been… Well, Harry supposes what one would consider _a best friend._ He thinks he knows now, how it all came to be. At the time it had only felt… natural. It was hard being around Ron and Hermione, as much as that, in itself, hurt. Ron’s grief was palpable, a big great cloud around him that constantly stuck its claws into barely healed wounds. Hermione’s desperate attempts to _keep going_ were just as suffocating. And they had each other. There was a balance to their rhythm, to their dynamic. Harry, alas, was just on the edge of that balance — a loose thread, a leftover.

Eighth Year was, fundamentally, a horrible idea. He knew McGonagall had sent them all the same letters, given them all the same tired _spiel_ about moving forward, making alliances, respecting sacrifices, showing unity on the face of evil.

But, as soon as they were back, the gaps were too visible, too obvious. Lavender Brown’s presence was missed the most, but the Patils didn’t come back either — the reason was obvious, even though no one would dare mention it. Harry had found it surprising how much he found himself thinking about Vincent Crabbe and what had happened in the Room of Requirement. Staring at an invisible spot behind Draco Malfoy, his brain going over what that empty space meant.

The only Hufflepuffs to come back had been Hannah Abbot and Justin Finch-Fletchley. Only about half of the Ravenclaws were back. The Gryffindors were only missing two. The most unexpected development was that a lot of Slytherins had come back, quiet and shy, with their tails tucked between their legs. Millicent Bullstrode, Pansy Parkinson, Daphne Greengrass, Theodore Nott, Blaise Zabini, Gregory Goyle and, of course, Draco Malfoy. 

Harry had refused to be involved in the trials after the _trial_ that the funerals had been, opting to give his statements to the DMLE directly and request that they’d be read at the relevant hearings for him, but he knew both the younger Malfoy and Goyle had been pardoned, on the basis that they’d been underage. Goyle Senior had been _accidentally killed_ upon capture and Malfoy Senior was rotting in Azkaban. None of the other Slytherins were marked or had been actively part of the war, but the stigma was there. Parkinson might as well bear the mark, with the way the weight of what she’d said in the wee hours of May Second seemed to follow her everywhere. One thing was clear from the get go: a pardon doesn’t blot out guilt, just like McGonagall thinking you’re ready to come back to school and _be a part of society_ doesn’t mean you have a clear conscience.

The Slytherins kept mostly to themselves for the first two months. It wasn’t until the day that Daphne Greengrass stopped coming to class and completely disappeared from the common room that Harry, Ron and Hermione realised there was something deeply wrong going on. 

Hermione, of course, had come up with a plan. Harry, of course, blew it on the first chance he had by cornering Parkinson and asking what the deal was. Daphne, it had seemed, had reached her limit after being hexed by a group of third years hurling slurs at her. “Does that happen a lot?” Harry had asked. “Just every hour of every day, Potter. We know we deserve it, though.”

But they didn’t. Harry built the bridge, and everyone followed. Alcohol was needed, at times. Chess had been the answer for some. Some found peace by studying together, exchanging notes. Harry himself didn’t know how he’d become _best friends_ with Pansy Parkinson, when exactly he’d let himself be caught in her unmistakable charm. Only that he had. And that he loved her and how, to some extent, they both understood what it was like to be a stranger around your own friends, even the ones you were ready to do anything — to die — for.

Harry barely remembers that first post-War Christmas in the Castle. The pain had been so big, so unbearable. For the first time since he was eleven, he realised he did not want to be at Hogwarts for Christmas. He remembers he paid attention to his godson for the first time then. He’d been forced to, by Andromeda. _“You can’t keep not looking at him, Harry. He needs to know you’re here for him,” she’d said, pushing the bundle of blankets that house Teddy into his arms. “You need to pay attention to him, pick him up, play with him. The fact that you keep popping in for tea and a quick hello doesn’t mean anything to a baby.”_ And she’d been right, of course. Harry had become a good godfather — the kind he thinks Sirius would have been had he had the chance. And he’d become a better friend because of that, too. 

He remembers his second post-War Christmas a lot better. He’d spent Christmas Day at the Burrow, the same way he has every year since. But he had spent Christmas Eve at Blaise, Draco and Pansy’s flat, drunk on wine and champagne that was too expensive to be consumed the way it had been. Cher’s _Believe_ had played at least twice every hour that night, with increasingly appalling performances by Pansy and Greg as it got later and later.

Even with the horrid choice of music and the undeniable inebriation, Harry remembers it as one of the best Christmas he’s ever had. Harry had always thought that posh houses were sad, depersonalised places with no soul. In retrospect, the poshest house he’d ever been to at that point was Malfoy Manor and he hadn’t the time to really appreciate the interior decor then. 

But The Penthouse is cosy and lovely and it feels like home. Harry remembers sitting on the windowsill, cautious of the tall candles burning either side of him, the stacks of books, and all the trinkets and decorations Pansy and the boys had put up, and watching the snow fall on the houses across and down onto the park outside. Everything had felt easy then.

The breakup had broken Harry at many levels and in many ways, but the loss of Pansy, Blaise, Theo, Millie and Greg had been, in a way, the worst part of it. If the blow of losing Draco had been bad, he didn’t know how to describe what losing half of his support group, half of the friendships, half of the people he loved and was used to seeing several days a week had been like.


	10. Tenth of December

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Harry dislikes the concept of a day off and the curse goes from bad to worse. 
> 
> Content warning for this one: this chapter features a (short and not massively explicit) description of seizures. As always, please remember this fic deals with themes of contagious illness and the consequent deterioration of health. It's never super explicit but we've all had enough of that this year and I don't want anyone reading anything they're not comfortable with :)

The seizures start on December Tenth. Draco’s is logged on the Healers’ neat charts as having started at two in the morning. Kevin’s starts just after breakfast, just as Harry is getting updated on Draco’s situation. Sam follows them both by lunch.

It’s meant to be Harry’s day off but he feels sick at the thought of sitting doing nothing while things are quite clearly getting worse before his very eyes.

He sits at Draco’s bedside when Captain Rodrigues expressly says he’s not allowed to do any work. No one can stop him from looking at his own notes though — he even takes a book with him as decoy — so he brings them over and looks at them again and again, trying and failing miserably to not stare at Draco. It’s hard to conciliate all the images he has of Draco into this body right in front of him. Draco, the wellbred pureblood bully that he was at eleven; Draco, the terrified teenager with the lives of his loved ones on his hands that he was at sixteen; Draco, the shy and quiet swot that he was at eighteen. The hardest ones to wrap his head around were Draco at twenty-three (his boyfriend who cut him more slack than Harry deserved even if Harry refused to see it at the time) and Draco at twenty-seven (lying in a hotel bed in Brazil with dried drool on the corner of his mouth that Harry can’t stop looking at). 

Harry struggles to make sense of his own notes, even though he can read them clearly. He understands the words, the meaning of them separately. But his focus isn’t there and he doesn’t understand how the words _go together._

His brain is stuck on a long lost feeling of Draco Malfoy’s hand in his, of popcorn-flavoured kisses, of complaints that it is _gauche_ to drink alcohol at the cinema and that the Muggles do have it right — _“fizzy drinks are the only way to go, except that they really do a number on your bladder and you end up missing part of the film”._ Eventually, missing parts of the film became something of a tradition, when Draco discovers he can drag Harry to the empty loos mid-film and they can get up to all manner of debauchery in the cubicles under a strong Muffliato. 

He’s lost in memories of weekly cinema dates and watery coca-cola when Marília pops over to check in on Draco’s status and looks at him with something akin to pity and Harry is convinced she’s figured him out, somehow.

Harry falls asleep sitting in the armchair by Draco’s bed, with the open case files on his lap. He wakes up to a beeping noise. He realises later that it would have been the spell over Draco alerting the Healers to any changes to his situation. But _he_ doesn’t need the spell. When he opens his eyes, he can clearly see Draco’s body tense up and release and tense up again, his eyes rolling back into his head and he has to thank the gods that the healers enter the room when they do, because he is about to touch Draco, all logic and sense of self-preservation gone.

“Harry, we’re gonna have to ask you to go outside now.”

Harry’s body goes through an impressive array of reactions in the short time that it takes _someone_ to drag him out of the room, only for him to escape their arms and run into his room, straight for the toilet where he promptly empties his stomach. He’s left heaving, and sweating, heart hammering away against his ribcage, rattling his insides. 

_Fuck._

When he can finally look up from the bowl, he finds himself staring at the silly Christmas tree they’ve set up in his room and scowling. Everything feels wrong, more than ever. No matter how lonely it feels even back home, at least he’d have his house, brilliant and cheery with the Christmas decorations he put up before he left and he knows he’ll come back only to take down as there isn’t one chance in hell he’ll be done here in time to be back for Christmas. 

But, even through the loneliness, he’d have his friends, he’d have _Teddy to make him feel like he matters, like he’s doing some good in this world. He’d stand by the window in the living room, listen to the fire crackling, put the wireless on, eat more chocolate than he should and watch the robins that always come to play in the garden in Grimmauld Place this time of year._

Instead, he crawls into bed and tries desperately not to cry, because there is nothing else to do. He’s exactly what Draco made clear he was, four years ago — a useless Auror, his only job playing the hero for Robards and Kingsley alike. He doesn’t even know why they’ve sent him here. Robards had made clear they didn’t even intend to send anyone even after the Brazilian force had requested international assistance until they found out a Ministry worker had been affected by the curse. _Bunch of bloody crooks._

He eventually falls into a fitful sleep, only to hear Draco’s voice in his head. Soft and muffled, as if they’re under water. Not exactly under water: Harry can breathe fine, even if his chest feels constricted at the sound of Draco’s voice in his ears, in his head. 

It’s almost like they’re floating, Draco isn’t even really there, in the dream. It’s just his voice — broken and detached from a body. Does Harry even remember what Draco’s voice really sounds like? Does it actually sound like Draco or is it just a cheap echo, a copy with an affected drawl?

The Draco in his dreams is usually a memory, one that tucks Harry’s hair behind his ear for him, calls him baby and tells him he’s sweet as treacle tart. The Draco in his dreams doesn’t call him Potter.

Only the one in real life does, and Harry knows _that_ one is currently indisposed.

Harry keeps waking up, only catching a handful of minutes of sleep in between visions of Draco’s body jerking violently on the bed, his hands twitching and grabbing at nothing, his eyes rolling back into his head. And, to add fuel to the fire, that same disturbing disembodied voice keeps filtering through his head calling his name like a sailor lost at sea.


	11. Eleventh of December

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A slightly longer one today, jam packed with curse information and Harry trying to get his shit together! 
> 
> I know this is probably annoying to some people buuuuut this is a reminder (again) that this fic deals with themes of contagious illness and the consequent deterioration of health so if you've had enough of 2020's vibes, this may not be for you.

No matter how much or how little he sleeps, waking up early becomes a habit. He showers just at the peak of sunrise, and steps into his balcony for a cigarette as the sky bleeds yellow, orange, pink and red over the horizon. He lies on the hammock, lets it swing freely, and admits to himself that he hit a low point yesterday and he just needs to pick up the pieces and get on with it. He closes his eyes and lets it all happen, washes himself clean of the guilt and the shame and the feelings he tries no to think about — that he knows aren’t true. 

He is good. He’s spent the past few years throwing himself into his work and becoming the best Auror he could be — he had been top of that specialisation in curse breaking course he took in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere in the U.S.A., and he was sent here because he is the best curse breaking Auror in the Ministry of Magic. His work can be exhausting, frustrating. It is definitely time-consuming and the reason he doesn’t have as much free time as he’d like to, but it’s what he’s good at. 

After breakfast and morning brief, Harry checks with all the Healers again, asks further questions, asks how much they’ve managed to get out of the patients about their circumstances when the curse first hit before they get caught on the barrier that stops them from saying anything else and just as he’s leaving the room, a brilliant thought occurs to him.

“Have you done any Muggle-style tests?” He asks one of the nurses.

“Like what?”

“Blood tests, that kind of thing,” he’s not really sure what he’s asking for here, but it could mean something.

“Oh, we don’t usually do that. Everything shows up in the diagnostic spells that would in a blood test, anyway,” the nurse explains, rather sheepishly.

“Can we be certain of that?” He asks, and suddenly, he’s not Harry, he’s _Harry Potter._

“Errr…”

“Right. I know how to take a viable blood sample through magic, I’ll grab some of Malfoy’s later.” He says, and stops, afraid the fear in his chest will be obvious in his voice if he keeps going. “If you think that will be okay? I’ll heal the cut after.”

“Sure, yeah,” says the nurse, even though she looks nervous as she does. “That shouldn’t be a problem.

“Great.”

 _Great. He’s casually going to take a blood sample from Draco, probably without his explicit consent_ because he doesn’t seem to be able to catch him while he’s awake anymore. _Great._

He doesn’t immediately, though. He has loose threads to grab, questions to ask. He will re-do every diagnostic spell if he has to, figure out a timeline of everything that has happened.

So far, he is looking at the curse from a victim point of view and a curse itself point of view. The information on the victims is limited, since they can’t talk about the spell. 

He sits down on a chair right in the corridor, halfway between his room and the Healer’s next to his. He doesn’t want to be alone in his room, he isn’t keen on the conference room, and he definitely, definitely, doesn’t want to taint his slice of heaven of a balcony with any more work. The corridor is long and he can keep an eye on Healer movement and ask for updates from other officers. So he sits on a rickety rattan chair right there in the corridor, only two steps away from his door and places his files down on the old wooden sideboard. For a second, his eyes focus on the small snow globe on it and… there’s something oddly familiar about it. He picks it up, and without a second thought, shakes it. He watches the white fluff fall over the miniature castle and realises what made it so familiar: it looks like Hogwarts. Tall and grey, with the soft snow falling over its tiny roof. 

He shakes his head and lets out a small chuckle. This is not the time for nostalgia. He settles properly on his chair, crosses one leg over the other, grabs the file on the top of the pile and reads over the information he has for each of the victims:

_ Draco _

__ _According to one of the maids, started showing symptoms on November eighteenth, sometime in the afternoon. He was overheard by a waiter telling Kevin how he was convinced he had sun stroke. The waiter doesn’t think they touched then, but clearly remembers Sam putting her hand on Draco’s forehead, which brings us to:_

_ Sam and Kevin _

__ _If they started feeling unwell earlier they didn’t tell anyone, the first time they were clearly showing symptoms was on November twentieth, in the early morning._

_ Beatriz _

__ _If the other maids’ assumptions were correct, she had probably touched either Sam or Kevin at some point while passing them clean towels or something of the like. She didn’t have any symptoms until the twenty-second._

_ Eulália _

__ _No symptoms until the twenty-fourth. She’s well known by the staff and, according to pretty much everyone, enjoyed grabbing people’s hands while delivering her habitual old lady wisdom — her own words, apparently — which explained how the curse had been passed over._

_ Zeca _

__ _After much giggling from both the maids and the waiters, Harry had figured out Zeca and Beatriz were in a tentative relationship so there was no need for wondering how they would have touched. He had first exhibited symptoms the night of the twenty-fourth._

_ António _

__ _António was the MagiPolícia officer that had been infected just before they realised the situation had to be contained. Even before the curse, he had been the person to say they should probably get international assistance for something of this dimension. Harry wasn’t sure yet he should thank him or not._

_ Healer Dias _

__ _The notes Harry had taken under Healer Dias’ name were the shortest, but perhaps the most relevant. He’d gone to see him several times a day to keep an eye on the progress of the curse and figure out how the curse itself developed over time by comparing his charts with Draco’s._

The curse, on the other hand, is trickier. Harry has, in a way, more information about the curse itself than he does about the victims. It’s just that he can’t figure out how the information fits together.

On average, it takes about a week for the victims to start getting more and more ill. It had taken Draco two and a half weeks to get to the stage where he wouldn’t be awake more than a few hours a day. _This_ is Harry’s main worry. Draco is getting worse, which means every victim will slowly follow in a similar fashion. And they don’t know what it’ll take. They don’t know if they have any time left. Harry feels like time is running out and he’s the only one who’s noticed.

The curse itself doesn’t directly affect the body. It’s a brain-focused curse. Diagnostic spells explain it deals with the part of the brain that controls unconscious thoughts and, therefore, dreams. Harry feels like he doesn’t know enough about Muggle medicine for this, so he gets a crash course on REM sleep from one of the Healers he pesters over a delicious lunch. 

They eat _acarajé_ and _vatapá_ and laugh at Harry’s attempts to pronounce the brazilian words, the sound so foreign in his mouth that Harry can’t help but join in the laughter. If the words felt alien to him, he doesn’t know what he could possibly say of the flavours — deep fried doughy bean parcels and a soft herby and spiced mix of seafood and coconut milk. Nothing like he’d ever had before.

The delightful lunch doesn’t deter him from his mission. He listens intently to every little bit of information the healers give him. He learns that the fatigue and slow decaying of the body aren’t directly caused by the curse itself, or at least nothing points that way. It’s all a side effect of the lack of sleep. The healers are convinced none of the victims are actually getting any rest and that their brains are constantly stuck on a loop of thought when they’re unconscious. 

After lunch, Harry sits to go over his notes again, as an excuse to gather his courage and go up to see Draco. It’s hard to figure out what he really wants: if Draco is awake, at least Harry can ask him how he feels about Harry taking a blood sample; if Draco isn’t awake, well… one way or another, he has to do this. 

Ironically, the first time Harry had seen anyone actively analyse a blood sample from a victim, it had been Draco in his midnight blue robes, hovering over a dead body like it was nothing, wand in hand, pulling a wee vial out of the depths of his pockets and pulling the blood out of the body and into the vial with a flourish. He’d then cast something on the vial that created what Harry could only describe as a localised blood cyclone inside the vial. Once settled, the liquid inside shone bright with diagnostic-type spells.

Harry and Draco didn’t really talk unless they had to, even when working cases together, so Harry had stored that image safely in his brain and asked Hermione about it later — she’d ended up teaching him the spells necessary. He’d only used it a couple of times since, but he knew how to do it. And he knew that Muggle style analysis of blood samples sometimes showed things you couldn’t tell when the blood was still inside the body. The world wasn’t so backwards that Muggleborn hatred was still an everyday thing, but the bias was still present, and introducing ideas like that into the Ministry was still an insufferably long process.

Draco was chatting to the Healer in a low voice when Harry crossed the threshold and cleared his throat to make them aware of his presence.

“Potter. Hadn’t seen you in a few days.”

 _Missed me like I miss you?_ Harry wants to ask.

Instead, he says, “Well, I see you every day. You’re just not awake for it.”

“So I’m told. Apparently I’ve been very sleepy.”

“Yeah. That’s a word for it.” Harry says, feeling awkward and out of place. 

There’s a beat, a couple of moments there where the world stands still. Harry, looking at Draco, and Draco, looking at Harry. And he has to wonder what Draco is thinking then, what he’s feeling. Because all Harry is thinking about is how much he wants to touch Draco, how much he wants to say he’s sorry. But if he hasn’t in the last four years, now is definitely not the time for it. So he ploughs on: 

“I’m glad you’re awake, though. I wanted to ask you something.”

“Oh?”

“Do you mind if I collect a sample of your blood so I can test it?”

Draco raises an eyebrow, looks at Harry and then down at the sheet covering him. “If you must. Do you even know how to do such a thing?” 

Harry grabs a vial out of his jeans and uncorks it with his teeth. He points the wand at Draco’s left arm and looks him in the eye until Draco nods, almost imperceptibly. 

He speaks the spell out loud, no wanting to fuck it up. He’s cut Draco enough for several lifetimes. He knows how badly. He’s watched him bleed on that bathroom floor, whimpering and crying. And, years later, he kissed and licked at every scar, whimpering and crying himself. 

“Thank you,” he says, and whispers the healing spell that seals Draco’s skin together as if nothing had ever happened.

“Hopefully this does it,” he adds, and leaves the room, because he’s not sure if he can bear to be in Draco’s presence any longer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fun fact: every Brazilian character in this is named after people I went to school with and their families, so thank you to people I've not spoken to in... almost two decades, I guess


	12. Twelfth of December

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> introducing a surprise weasley and surprise past relationship... these may or may not be connected  
> (hint: they definitely are)

Harry steps out onto the balcony and has a soak in the pool first thing in the morning, thinking maybe something new will keep his spirits high. His reaction to witnessing Draco’s seizures and then actually talking to Draco left him a little shaken, so he is doing his best — purely out of spite and stubbornness — to keep going. Enjoying the little things.

His small balcony pool has the most beautiful view. It’s nice being out of the city — somewhere that, even in the heat and general cheery feeling, would end up feeling a little like London. Every city he’s ever been to had felt a little like London, after a while. 

But from the balcony he can see the small private beach that belongs to the resort and the long path going down towards it. He can see the sunlight reflecting on the water — so bright it almost hurts his eyes. He can hear the hubbub of the main resort from just out of his field of vision. Laughing, singing, animated chattering. He can just about make out the little cart on the beach path he knows sells fresh fruit, and he finds himself thinking of the Christmas markets back home.

A memory of last year comes to mind, clear as freshly fallen snow. Of walking through large crowds with the sound of Christmas carols as a soundtrack. Dragging Teddy away from the toy stalls by the hand and witnessing Rosie’s little eyes open wide in awe at the twinkling lights and decorations, as well as Ron and Hermione’s reactions to their baby daughter’s pure delight.

Part of him wants to miss home. Wants to dwell on it, wallow in his own misery. But, truth be told, right now he’d much rather go down and speak to the kind Brazilian lady selling the most delicious, plump and juicy mangos than have to open through a bag of roasted chestnuts that burn his fingers only for Teddy to eat 80% of the chestnuts he opens anyway. Not everything is bad and he just has to keep reminding himself of that.

When he gets out of the shower, he looks at his diary, his notebook, his growing pile of papers and files and, when he spots the scribbled date in the corner, the realisation that it is Charlie’s birthday hits him like a bludger to the head. 

Some days he still finds himself annoyed that they broke up. 

_“It’s only fair a Weasley gets to break up with you after what you did to me,” Ginny had said, laughing at him._

He was never miserable, not even hurt — unlike after _the other breakup_. He just wished things had worked out. He just wished he wasn’t so goddamn caught up in Draco Malfoy.

“If you ever want to fool around with someone who knows _how to tame a dragon,_ Harry, you know where to find me,” Charlie had said, with a chuckle and a wink. “But you’re in love with someone else, and that isn’t fair on either of us.

He had been good about it. _Too good. Better than Harry deserved, that’s for certain._

It must be a Weasley thing.

He’s got time before breakfast so he works on re-organising his notes, since they now consist of a tiny pocket-diary, a large notebook he spells smaller so he can carry it around and several loose pieces of paper with the same information on it again and again and again, because, no matter what, he ends up with no real answers and back where he started.

He casts a few spells that Hermione has taught him and, _lo and behold,_ his notes are organised by date and colour coded. Hermione saves the day, again, even from miles and miles away. 

It’s easier to think this way. It’s easier when he looks at his notes, to see what is connected. To try and find what’s missing, because he knows he is missing something.

He starts at the top, again.

_ Draco Malfoy _

He runs through the short list under Draco’s name. Of what they know for sure. It is short and mostly unhelpful. Harry has been in Brazil for 9 days now and everything that they know gives them more questions than answers. 

He looks at the paper that has got all his theories for the curse.

_ The Problem _

_(Curse/Potion)_

He is still reeling from the discovery that no one considered it could be a potion and not a spell, hence his passive aggressive title. Even if no one will see the notes, he will see and remember. Under the heading he has divided the sheet into two columns. Under the curse column, he has written 6 bullet points:

_\- Possible partial obliviation_

_\- Possible partial imperio_

_\- Rapid deterioration of general health_

_\- Night terrors/sleep paralysis-type symptoms_

_\- Victim seems to be aware of their surroundings when unconscious, just not able to function (sleep paralysis)_

Under the potion column, he has a little less:

_\- Questions as to how it was administered: do we suspect anyone who works in the kitchen? a waiter?_

_\- Symptoms similar to a weakened draught of the living dead/maybe a sleeping draught_

_\- Can potion symptoms even be passed through touch?_

At the very bottom of the page, he has, underlined several times with increasing pressure on the page:

_ Do we **know** that touch is actually how it was transmitted from victim to victim?  _

He doesn’t expect a breakthrough anymore, but he has to do something, so he transfigures the notebook into a thick folder where he fits all his now organised notes, shrinks it and puts it in his pocket. He’ll do it all again, after breakfast. Ask the same questions, try the same diagnostic spells, harass the healers into giving him more information — anything. Anything that can stop this and let him go home, where he’ll be just as sad, if not more, but at least he won’t have to look at Draco every day and be reminded of how much he’s fucked up.

At the end of the day — another sweaty, exhausted, unproductive day — he decides to owl Charlie. He knows as soon as he pulls the small piece parchment out that he will regret it when Charlie inevitably mocks him for his emotional taking of pen to paper, but right now, he can’t be bothered.

_Charlie,_

_Happy birthday! I hope you’ve had a wicked one and the dragons are all still behaving under your watchful eye. You’re good with wild creatures — believe me, if anyone knows, it would be me._

_I’m not sure if you’ve spoken to anyone at home, but it’s almost Christmas so I’m assuming your mum is on the Floo to you every three days making sure you’ll be at The Burrow for, at least, Christmas Day. Anyway, I’m not sure you know but I’ve been sent on an urgent mission to Brazil. I’ve been here since the 3rd, which has both been great and a bit weird. It’s a tiring and emotional mission that I honestly wish I could tell you about._

_I’m prepared for you to tell me off like you did the past hundred times I said it, but Charlie, I am sorry._

_You continue to be my favourite Weasley. Don’t tell Ron._

_See you soon,_

_H.P._


	13. Thirteenth of December

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> taking serious creative liberties with my 25 Days of Draco and Harry prompt today, but your gal loves a challenge and, let's face it, it's totally on me that i decided to write a christmas story with a tropical twist
> 
> today i offer you a harry who is back to his initial doom and gloom for now... but not entirely without cause (or is it?)

On the thirteenth of December, Harry wakes up with a sore head that may as well be a hangover, or even a very bad flu. He had dreamt of the voice ( _that_ voice — _Draco’s_ voice?)all night and he feels like he is going insane, slowly but steadily. It’s a feeling akin to fog taking over a poorly ventilated bathroom after a hot shower, or like frost forming on a window — like his whole brain is ceasing to function, being taken over by ice. A fear that he’s somehow being affected by the curse settles deep in him — after all, he’s always been highly sensitive to certain types of magic. Memories of Dementors in his third year, and that horrible locket burning against the skin of his chest settle comfortable in his mind, as if to say they’ll be there all day, plaguing him, making sure he doesn’t forget.

Harry feels nauseous the whole day, even if Marcos tries to stuff him up to the brim with deliciously chocolatey brigadeiros. It hurts because he can’t stop himself from thinking how much Draco and his chocolate obsession would absolutely love the little creamy treats.

Harry tries to tell himself that he trusts the Brazilians. Is he being mean for not trusting them? And then, he asks himself — would he trust any Auror back home with this investigation?

And he knows the answer is no. It isn’t that he doesn’t know these officers, he’s sure they’re just as proficient as he is himself, and all his comrades back home. It’s that it happens to be Draco’s life on the line, and he doesn’t think anyone understands how _big_ , how _urgent_ this is.

He hopes no one is offended by him taking the time to clear every room, from the cleaning cupboard to the honeymoon suite. He casts every diagnostic spell he knows, anything that may catch a strand of magic, an unusual spell, an out-of-place charm. Some of the officers stop to help at points during the day. 

_He feels awful._ He doesn’t know how to tell them, he doesn’t know how to put into words that he isn’t discrediting their skill — he just needs Draco alive and well.

He makes vague attempts at breaking the tension with empty words, shrugs and says things like “just seeing if anything pops up,” and “I’m at a loss for what to do at this point.”

And he isn’t lying. But it’s not really the whole truth.

Obviously, nothing just “pops up.” Not one thing. 

It’s only the thirteenth and the days are dragging. He’s losing faith in everything. The case, the cure, the people around him, himself.

He feels wrong, strange, like his wires are all caught up in a ball, tangled up and crossed and not connected to where they should be. He’s never been on a mission like this in the 7 years he’s been in the force — he’s been sent here alone, yet has the biggest team he’s ever had for an emergency away mission; he has a schedule that includes time for meals and days off and it’s basically a 9 to 5, except that he never stops thinking about it. It’s wrong. There’s something intrinsically wrong with the whole situation.

Of course, he’d be lying if he didn’t admit that the crux of the matter is that Draco Malfoy is dying and Harry is here to watch it all happen because he can’t seem to fix it.

The nurse comes at around seven in the evening, when Harry is sat outside with a couple of officers, trading weird case stories or facts about people they’ve had to arrest for odd reasons. They sit and talk to the sound of people laughing from the other side of the resort, a low whisper of music by someone called Chico Buarque whose words Harry does not understand but he is coming to love anyway. 

Harry’s guilt is assuaged by his lit cigarette _(he’ll have to quit again)_ and his contentment fueled by the delicious teardrop shaped doughy fried chicken they call _coxinhas_ and the fluffy cheesy goodness that is _pão de queijo_ _(he’ll have to start working out properly again)_ which have become the staple of Harry’s diet. Between a story about the 80 year old naturist he had to arrest in Diagon Alley and another mouthful of chicken, he makes a mental note to ask someone for a recipe. He knows for a fact that Ron is gonna love Brazilian food.

The nurse walks out into the patio and clears his throat. “Er, Mr. Potter?” He looks up immediately, wondering what could possibly have happened. 

“I’ve already told Captain Rodrigues, but I thought you’d want to be notified. It’s been 30 hours since Mr. Malfoy was last awake.”

It takes him a few seconds to register what was said, and then it takes him a few more to decide if he can open his mouth without losing the contents of his stomach.

“He’s not woken up at all today?” Harry asks, trying to remain as calm as possible.

“No, Sir, I’m sorry.” And he does look it, actually genuinely sorry, and Harry can only wonder what _he_ looks like to warrant _that_. 

He tries to make it better with a dismissive “Oh, it’s okay. We’re all doing all we can,” but his heart aches when he says it and he decides it’s time to go up to his room.

It’s only made worse by the fact that he has to walk past Draco’s room — where he’s been asleep for over 30 hours — to get to his own room.

He slouches on the little sofa in the corner and lets it all come to him. He’s missing something. He’s missing something and he’s letting himself get frustrated over it. 

With a further stab to his heart, he thinks about how good Draco would be at this. How his clever brain works, how he would pull his bottom lip into his mouth in frustration and lick at it in concentration. How you can very nearly see the cogs turning in his head, his mechanical pencil tapping away against his hand.

How painful it is that he wishes _Draco was here,_ but mostly, he wishes Draco _wasn’t here at all._

_Draco with his tan, and his tiny shorts, and his laboured breathing and twitching eyes under his eyelids, whole body jerking with spasm after spasm._

He scatters the notes all over his bed and reads them obsessively, for what feels like the hundredth time. He can hear Hermione telling him off for working in bed, something about it not being healthy and “one needing a physical barrier” and “not bringing work where you rest”, but he’s not sleeping tonight anyway and he is running out of time.


	14. Fourteenth of December

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i wrote this whole chapter with the original score for Midsommar (2019) playing in the background because i hate myself but understand that setting the mood is key
> 
> content warning before you beautiful angels proceed to my tale of brooding and despair: about 75% of this chapter is a rather sad masturbation scene, so if you're not into horny but sad, you may want to sit this one out
> 
> today's prompt really came to save this from ending in a most depressing note, so everyone should be grateful that 25 Days of Draco and Harry exists and has lent this chapter a little cheer

Harry ends up getting a couple hours of sleep just before sunrise. He doesn’t know if he makes the decision at some point during the night or first thing when he wakes up but he firmly sets the boundary that he won’t see Draco. He knows Draco is their main focus because he was the first to show symptoms of the curse, the one who passed the curse onto everyone else, who started this hellish domino effect. But he won’t see Draco, he _can’t see_ Draco.

Draco distracts him from all that is important. His focus is on finding where this curse came from and what it is so that it can be stopped. 

But as he lies in bed, still an hour or two before he’s really meant to be awake, Draco is all he can think about. The sun shines through the tall windows, a welcome breeze rustles the soft sheer curtains, and Harry thinks of Draco. Of that first day he saw him, when he was still weirdly cheerful and snarky, despite everything. 

_Draco lying in his soft, white bed, against so many pillows. Draco and his god damned tanned skin and golden hair falling in his eyes. Draco in his tiny little navy shorts and his tight white t-shirt. His lips, chapped and dehydrated, his long fingers, twisted against the sheets and he can’t help but think that he knows what those lips feel like against his, how good those fingers feel like in him—_

Fuck.

His cock twitches in his shorts before he can even berate himself for allowing his thoughts to go that way and he lets his hand caress his chest and stomach, a gentle loop of upwards and downwards motions that reach lower and lower with every downstroke.

Before he can stop himself, his right hand has wrapped itself around his rapidly hardening cock and set a rather unforgiving pace. 

It’s all a mixture of a Draco he used to know, and the Draco that’s lying in his bed twisting and turning uncomfortably a few rooms away from Harry’s. _It’s a memory of Draco kissing down his sternum, then a memory of Draco drawling his name, dragging it slowly, rolling it in his tongue. It’s “Harry, baby, you feel so fucking good.” And then “Auror Potter. I did wonder who they’d send to save me.” And “fuck, baby, yes, yes” again._

Harry knows what he wants. Sometimes there is no point delaying the inevitable, even if shame burns deep in his gut as Harry conjures lube on his palm, smears half of it on his cock and uses the rest to ease two fingers into himself with a low groan that doesn’t soothe the shame or the burn. He’s not being gentle and he’ll feel it for the rest of the day, he knows it.

He’s keenly aware that he shouldn’t be doing this if he’s worried about Draco distracting him from the case, but _maybe_ if he does just get off he’ll get over it. _“Yeah, because that has worked phenomenally the past four years…”_

He just can’t help it. How can he when he closes his eyes and he can hear Draco, clear as if he was in the room right in this very moment, _“If you’re a good boy, I’ll let you come”,_ if he can practically feel Draco’s lips grazing the shell of his ear as his hands manoeuvre Harry like he’s nothing but a ragdoll, whispering _“I know you can be good, Harry. You will, won’t you, baby? For me?”_

Harry knows he won’t last as he slides a third finger in, losing himself in the feeling and the memory of Draco’s mouth.

_Draco._ Draco in his bed, his gorgeously tanned skin, his teeny tiny navy shorts that fall just under where Harry knows Draco’s tattoo is, his neverending long legs, his toned arms. Draco, who’s just a few doors down. Draco who looked at him like he was a vision, who had said “Auror Potter'' the way he would anyone else’s name. Because he won’t say Harry anymore. The same way he won’t call him love or baby anymore. The same way he says “I did wonder who they’d send to save me”, even if his voice cracks a little on the word save. _Save him._

He reaches his right thumb up , swipes it across the shining pearly top of his cock and bites back a moan. Then does it again, increasing the pressure. Paying attention to the head while his fingers press into him and he’s so close. _So close._

_“I’m gonna hurt you, Potter. I’m going to ruin you for anyone that tries to have you after I have you. You’re mine.”_

Fuck _._

_“I did wonder who they’d send to save me.”_

Save him. _Save him._ Harry has to save him. What if Draco doesn’t wake u— What if he never wakes up? What if Harry fails and he has to go home and tell the Department of Mysteries that he couldn’t save Draco, tell Narcissa that Draco is de—

He comes with a cry and the shame flares up deep in him. It’s the saddest, most pathetic, most disgusting wank of his life. He sits there, covered in sweat, spunk dripping down his fist, tears slowly trailing down his cheeks. 

He spells away the evidence of his sins, shorts included because he can’t bear to know what he did in them, on them. He’ll just have to sleep in boxers or transfigure something to sleep in. That is the least of his worries.

_He’s fucked, absolutely one hundred percent, entirely fucked._

He has to get through today, figure out the many intricate layers on this curse and make sure Malfoy is returned intact to the Department of Mysteries. He’s survived four years working in the same building as his ex. He won’t let this break him. _And most importantly, he will not let Draco die._

He carries the shame with him all through the day, even after turning up for the morning brief to be told, “It is your day off, Mr. Potter.” 

To make matters spectacularly worse, as soon as he complains, he’s told “we knew you wouldn’t want to take it so we made sure you’ve got plans. Marcos is taking you to the beach.” And fucking _fuck_ , he doesn’t know if he’s more upset at how ungrateful he is for these wonderful, kind, generous people or at the fact that he’ll have to feel useless and pretend he’s having fun for the rest of the day.

He follows Marcos down to the little private beach, mostly in silence. They stop and get little cups of cut up fruit from the lady and her cart halfway down the path. She smiles at Harry with a sad look in her eyes, like she can see right through him, like he carries his premature grief visibly on him. 

Harry doesn’t say a word until his feet are buried in sand and Marcos is passing him the sunscreen and casting a protective bubble around them, which Harry is grateful for. They still don’t really know how the curse works and he’d rather be safe.

Harry throws his t-shirt right on the sand next to his sunglasses and when he looks at his companion next, he can’t help but let out an amused snort, because Marcos is wearing the most dreadful swimming shorts Harry has ever seen. Red with white trim and a golden buckled belt, just like Santa’s velvet suit. And even if it’d stopped at that, it would have been bad enough. Sadly, the shorts feature a rather prominent pair of antlers around the crotch and Rudolph’s face, complete with red nose and all, just about where Marcos’ dick should be. 

Jesus Christ. He shakes his head in disbelief and Marcos barks out a laugh.

“What!?” he asks, casually. “It’s Christmas, Harry!” And Harry laughs for the first time that day.

Whether or not his brain did it on purpose is a different matter, but it isn’t until he’s returned to the resort, sandy and sweaty, that he realises it’s exactly four years since the day Draco threw the silver snake ornament at Harry’s head and slammed the door to his house for the very last time.


	15. Fifteenth of December

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a gentle offering of softness (okay, it's still this fic, don't get the wrong idea, miserable-and-enjoying-it is still the mood, but, yeah... a little softness because we've only got ten days to go!!!)

Harry’s body regrets the beach day as soon as he wakes up. He’s not burnt, thank Merlin, but he is _knackered._ His muscles are sore and heavy and his head is pounding as if he drank a hundred or more of those tiny sparkling blue shots that Luna and Ginny love to buy him when they go out clubbing.

It doesn’t help that he keeps dreaming of Draco, and he really should be used to it at this point but something feels distinctly _off_ about these dreams. He’s still hearing Draco’s disembodied voice at times. Other times, Draco has a body but he makes Harry chase him. It’s like Harry is already dreaming, having whatever awful nightmare his brain has decided on, and then Draco is there, randomly. Draco is in the kitchen at Grimmauld Place, or in Regulus’ room. Draco is at the edge of the Forbidden Forest, or in the Gryffindor Common Room. Draco is right there in Harry’s hotel room, or in the balcony, telling Harry off for smoking. It’s strange, and out of place, and makes Harry wake up with his heart in his throat.

He’d gotten an owl from Hermione the night before. _“It’s snowing in Ottery St. Catchpole. Rosie is beyond herself. Andromeda is bringing Teddy over one of these days, because it feels like they only get to play together when you’re around. Rosie loves Teddy and it’s good for her to have someone older who can tell her all about Hogwarts before she gets to go. Someone like you and I didn’t get to have. Obviously, she’ll have her older cousins, but it’s different. Oh, which reminds me, Fleur is expecting again!”_

And Harry means to be happy, he really does… but he isn’t. He’s just reminded again that the world keeps moving on without him and he’s still stuck on someone he should have managed to forget a long time ago.

He tries to put that out of his head and focus on his goals for the day. It’s too easy to get lost in fantasies of family and friends. The sooner he’s done with the case, the sooner he gets to go home to that.

The blood sample that he got from Draco does prove somewhat helpful. He finally has a chance to discuss his discoveries with the Captain during the morning brief, just after breakfast. 

He makes his point clearly and calmly, still not wanting to step on any toes. He is the foreigner here and no one knows how much solving this case really means to him. 

It floors him a little that the Captain’s reaction to Harry’s small and not entirely useful discovery is to tell him: “You’re a very dedicated young man, Auror Potter. You must know, we all know who you are, of course. The name Harry Potter means something to all wizard kind, not just on your side of the pond. But I see you, Auror Potter, as you. And your Ministry is lucky to have you.”

It takes Harry a little while to recover from that unexpected bit of praise, but he ploughs on with his head held high and a pep in his step.

Draco had woken up for a brief few minutes the day before, while Harry was out, but has since been asleep with no changes whatsoever. He seems to be the only one to have gone this far under — everyone else is still waking up for a few hours a day, in varying states of lucidity.

He gets teamed with Isaac and Lis, the two younger officers. He keeps thinking of them that way, although they’re probably the same age as he is himself, minus the natural British gloom, which probably helps them look a bit younger. They’ve got a couple of officers doing the rounds and doing check ups on victims while their job is to compare their notes against what Harry’s found in the blood to narrow down their options.

Harry feels, yet again, blessed with the hospitality of the wonderful people he’s lucky to be working with. This is a stressful case, every officer in here is as stuck as he is, having opted to isolate from their own families until the curse is no longer a threat. And yet, every day, they ask about his life and his friends and he learns about theirs in return. He sees pictures of dogs and cats and birds and children and husbands and wives and gets offered more local delicacies than he could possibly fit in his stomach. It’s not a bad deal if he doesn’t think about Draco for those few short seconds. It reminds him life doesn’t always have to be so lonely.

Being unable to resist the urge, Harry stops by Draco’s room before he settles in his bedroom before dinner.

“Oh. You’re awake,” he says, unable to stop himself when he sees Draco sitting up, slouched against a sea of crisp white pillows.

“Hello, Potter,” Draco says. He doesn’t smile but he’s not unpleasant. On the bed, over Draco’s lap there’s a forest green cotton bag with the familiar two quills of the Flourish & Blotts logo. Harry wonders if the bag is full of books and if Draco can stay awake long enough to actually read, at the same time that he tries to banish a memory of standing in the freezing cold under the wooden sign with that same two quilled-logo queueing for a signed book for Draco’s Christmas four years ago.

“How are you feeling?” He says, aware that he had not prepared for Draco to be awake and is unsure how to proceed. He hovers halfway between the door he just entered through and Draco’s bed.

“The Healers have seen to me already, I’ve been up for at least half an hour, you don’t have to do that.” 

“I am not just doing my job, you know? I am asking you how you are.”

An unreadable expression crosses Draco’s features for a quick second before it goes back to impassive. “Oh. Thanks. Very tired.”

It’s not that Draco is being _nice._ Harry knows he isn’t. He knows a nice Draco, and this is not it. But at least he’s not being snarky and arrogant with his fake airs and short answers he’s been giving Harry for the past couple of weeks. He finds himself unable to come up with an excuse to leave, not to spend any more time with Draco, so, despite the intense roaring in his ears, Harry asks “Do you need anything?”

“I reckon I can’t convince you to take me outside, if I can’t convince the Healers?” Draco asks.

“If the Healers don’t think you should, I’m afraid I can’t.”

“Right.” Draco says, slowly, but Harry can tell there’s disappointment there.

“Will yo— Potter, would you sit by the window,” he gestures slowly, towards the cracked door that goes into the balcony, “just, I don’t know, describe it to me?”

Harry is taken aback, again, but he doesn’t have the heart to say no.

He drags a chair over and is grateful for the early evening air, runs a hand through his truly unruly hair (the sweat? the humidity? and to think he’d been told his hair is a mess back in Britain) and says to Draco, “I’m no poet.”

“I know, Potter, just do it.”

And he does. He describes the very last remnants of sunlight peeking through the horizon, tells him about the birds on the trees, the breeze blowing through the bushes, the intoxicating smell of the flowers that drape over the tile that surrounds the balcony. He tries his best and keeps his eyes focused on the balcony, on the world inside, so much bigger than this room and all the things unsaid between them. He doesn’t know how long he does it for, but when he looks at the bed again, Draco is asleep, so he rearranges the pillows with a few flicks of his wand, levitates the bag of books from the bed onto the floor and hopes Draco is comfortable enough before he slips out of the room and into his own bed.


	16. Sixteenth of December

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please don't hate me but i am really just stringing you along for another couple of days... metaphorically you're a cat and i am dangling a wee piece of string in front of you _just_ out of your reach, sorry   
> BUT GIVE THE MAN A BREAK OKAY THIS CURSE IS IMPOSSIBLE AND HE'S HAVING A TOUGH TIME  
> cheerio x

_“Blaise Zabini, Draco Malfoy and Pansy Parkinson live at Number 27P, Hyde Park Gardens in London,” Theo tells Harry, Ron and Hermione in a solemn voice. He knows exactly what Theo is doing — Harry, of course, is no stranger to the Fidelius Charm, which is probably why a shiver goes through his whole body before he’s able to stop it. He knows why his friends’ new place needs a Fidelius Charm._

_“The world is unkind to sinners and Slytherins alike, and the three of us, dear Harry, happen to be both,” Blaise says, the first time Harry is dragged over to the penthouse on the edge of Hyde Park, as if that is any excuse for the amount of abuse they receive if they ever step foot in Diagon Alley._

_Their little world becomes reduced to that house. Harry is waiting for Auror training to start, Hermione is starting university, Ron is… adrift, although still giving George a hand at the shop when he’s needed. Theo and Millie have got Muggle jobs. Greg goes to therapy every second day. Seamus and Dean… have each other and their small studio flat, and that seems to be enough for them. The three Slytherins have their Penthouse that can host them all pretty much every night and the fortune of three big Pureblood families to blow on alcohol, takeaways and Muggle drugs. Even without the War situation, they wouldn’t be the most likely group of people to ever come together. But, despite the circumstances, it makes sense, at least to Harry._

It made sense even before he fell in love with Draco — he supposes maybe that was his mistake. If he’d told Draco to get out of his bed that night, or refused to go for coffee the morning after, or for dinner the weekend after that. If he hadn’t bought Draco that ridiculous hat he wanted, or if he hadn’t let Draco convince him to get his nose pierced when Draco went in to get his tattoo around the Mark. Maybe, if he hadn’t done all those things, he wouldn’t have lost half his friends.

Harry realises it’s a dream just as Pansy is giving him the tour of the Penthouse, pointing out ridiculous interior design details like the gold snake shaped lamps on the hallway sideboard, or the perfect — if half sized — replica of Michelangelo’s David, or the bar cart that very obviously belonged in an actual bar and not in a house owned by three 20 year olds. He knows it is a dream because Blaise and Draco had been out when Pansy gave him the tour. “I’ve sent the boys for champagne and oysters,” she’d said, “because tonight, we feast like kings, Harry darling.” And he knows it’s a dream because just as she says it, a devious smile shaping her dark purple lips, Harry spots Draco sitting in his emerald green velvet armchair in the living room. 

Draco smiles when he locks eyes with Harry — a smile so out of place and so unlike Draco that it turns Harry’s stomach; a sad, soft smile that doesn’t reach his eyes — and says, very slowly, “good evening, Auror Potter.”

And Harry is awake before dawn. Again. He has an early shower and a wank where he pretends his thoughts don’t go beyond skinny, tall, nameless blondes (then why does this fantasy blonde have silvery white scars all over his chest?). Again. He smokes a cigarette on the balcony and thinks about how he misses home until the cigarette burns his fingertips because he got lost in thought and let it burn all the way down. Again. He debates whether or not he’d actually enjoy a tropical Christmas, under different circumstances. If he’d do it one year. Just go to the beach and eat the tiny coconut-y custard-y flans they call Quindim and not think about heartbreak and loneliness. He never had much of a Christmas as a child, so his guess is that the feeling at the bottom of his gut is, at least a little bit because of Hogwarts. 

It doesn’t snow in London like it does up there. Hogwarts had truly been Christmas Wonderland. Snow, lights, trees, presents. Not to mention the decorations out in the Great Hall and _the food._

If he’s being honest, he’d hit the jackpot when it comes to food, because, considering she’s only one woman and not a small army of house elves, Molly’s Christmas Feasts at the Burrow come a very close second to the ones he’d loved at Hogwarts. The table at the Burrow could do with a replacement at this point. There is only so many extending charms a piece of furniture can take, and it does seem the Weasleys tend to reproduce like rabbits. Harry wouldn’t be surprised if there was a new member of the family to sit at that table every year for at least the next ten years. And there’s always so much, something for everyone. There are gingerbread biscuits decorated by the older kids, and two puddings per adult on top of the roasties, the turkey, the ham, the stuffing, the pigs in blankets, the gravy, the red cabbage and the sprouts.

A table, decorated to perfection and covered in food and candles and magical fairy lights. Most importantly, a table surrounded by laughter and conversation. 

Marcos knocks on Harry’s door just before breakfast and, without thinking, Harry says “come in.” He knows it’s a mistake when he spots the frown on Marcos’ face and he gets asked how long he’s been sitting there, looking through the files.

“Long enough to know I have no idea what we could have possibly missed,” he says, resigned.

“So… a couple of weeks?” Marcos says, and it makes Harry smile.

“Let’s go down for breakfast, have a coffee and a cigarette and you’ll see the world with clear eyes again.”

It doesn’t exactly work, but he supposes it helps, a little. 

An owl comes for him as he’s chatting with António, the MagiPolícia officer that caught the curse just before Harry was sent here. António seems to struggle the most with talking around the curse and giving them information. Harry feels like it’s probably because he’d been involved in the investigation before — he knows they _need_ as much information as they can get. It’s hard to keep the conversation going because António tries and tries and tries and all it means is that his eyes go a little glassy and lost every once in a while and he can’t remember what he was trying to tell Harry about.

He only reads the letter late at night in bed, and is surprised to find it’s not from Hermione, or Ron, or even Luna, but from Charlie.

If Harry often feels like he doesn’t deserve Ginny’s friendship, he definitely does not deserve how nicely Charlie still treats him.

Charlie is all rough around the edges with his buzzcut and the bulkier-and-fitter than your average Weasley body. There’s also the tattoos, the dragonhide boots, the bracelets around his wrists, and the burns all over his body. Charlie looks like a tough guy, but he’s sweet as a Sugar Quill when it comes down to it.

Things were weird after their breakup, mostly because of Harry. Harry had convinced himself Charlie was his ticket to become a Weasley. Officially. Properly. That it would solve all his problems.

But, more than sweeter-than-honey and hotter-than-hell, Charlie had been observant and astute. Harry had thrown himself into sleeping around and getting drunk and fucking with the press to fill the void that losing Draco and the Slytherins had left. Then, he’d had the Big Injury of 2005, which had left him incapable of doing field work for a handful of months and led him to Romania for deep physical rehab.

It had been an easy mistake to make. Confusing the way he felt about Charlie’s unmistakably Weasley brand of love and how good he was in bed for falling in love. Too easy to think of it all as belonging. As family. 

Charlie had been patient and kind, but ultimately, he had made Harry realise he was still in love with Draco. Not much had changed since.


	17. Seventeenth of December

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i’m not saying something big is happening soon, but i am also not not saying it. for now, Harry reflects on grief (of course, because he’s not having a bad enough time as it is)

There are a lot of things that come with the trauma of being deeply familiar with your own and others’ mortality from a very young age. Something to be said about never having known one’s parents — not understanding the fear and dread of seeing the people that brought you into this world get older. He does, to an extent, with Molly and Arthur. But there’s a deep, slightly ashamed part of him that knows it’s not the same.

Harry is familiar with death. Harry is probably more familiar with death than most, if he’s being honest. Godric, Harry has actually died before. Not a lot of people walking around can say that. 

What never fails to floor Harry is natural death. The prospect that, if life goes the way it should, you just… get old and eventually die. Hopefully peacefully in your bed, or whatever it is most people wish for. He’s used to tragedy, to traumatic death. To children losing parents, parents losing children, children losing brothers, sisters, friends, classmates, boyfriends, girlfriends, teachers, _godfathers and other father figures…_

The fragility of older life had occurred to him before. Funnily enough, never with Dumbledore, who had looked even older than the hundred-and-something years old he was when he died. He’d encountered it in Bathilda Bagshot, who had turned out to be already dead. He’d encountered it in Ollivander, skinny and bruised in the dungeons of Malfoy Manor. And he encounters it in Brazil, in the form of a tiny white-haired witch who speaks so fast that the translation charm struggles to keep up at times. 

Eulália is one-hundred-and-twenty-two years old and has been a widow for over thirty years. “I’m pretty young for a witch, you know,” she tells Harry. “Plenty of life left in me.” And that sends Harry down a spiral almost as deep as thinking about Draco does. Because this funny, kind and cheerful old woman has survived this many years, but she is going to die here in a beautiful hotel on Christmas because Harry can’t seem to wrap his head around this _godawful_ curse.

Something that strikes Harry as curious while he sits in Eulália’s bedroom is the sheer amount of presents under her small tree. He wonders, for a moment, if they are just part of the decoration but he didn’t have any and he hasn’t seen any in the other rooms. He allows himself to be a little nosy and, before he leaves the room, he asks her about the bright red and shining gold parcels. She smiles and says “when you live this long you have a lot of time to make a lot of friends, Harry Potter,” as if that answers it all. 

If he can’t do it for Draco, he’ll have to do it for this sweet lady who tells him about her life, her children, the places she’s been. She tells him about love, and loss, and faith and Harry listens and thinks about how he never had a grandmother. It’s a futile aspiration, but, if by some miracle, they all get out of here alive, he’ll try to keep in touch with Eulália and her wonderful old lady stories.

It doesn’t help his disposition that he can’t remember the last time he has had a full night’s sleep. The nightmares seem to get worse and worse as days go by. More impossible. More ludicrous. Although, incredibly realistic. It’s gotten to the point where Harry wishes for his bed and for restful sleep all during the day but dreads actually going to bed at night. 

It reminds him of those first few months, back in Hogwarts. The whispering of silencing spells around their bed drapes was a bedtime ritual for pretty much everyone. Although there were always days where someone would forget, and the whole dormitory would end up down in the Common Room, fingers wrapped around steaming cups of hot chocolate or tea, legs wrapped in cosy knitted blankets, arms wrapped around each other.

Harry never wakes up screaming here. Just tired. Confused, with his head pounding, and his heart beating wildly in his chest. The sweating is just a normal 24/7 occurrence here so he won’t count it as a side-effect of his nightmares, even if he knows it’s never quite as bad as it is when he wakes up in a puddle in the middle of the night, Draco’s voice echoing, _desperate_ in his head.

Harry considers maybe he should have paid more attention in Divination class. Should have attempted to learn how to decipher the fucked up dreams that keep haunting him.

What to make of it when he dreams of the night Draco decided he wanted to try something new.

_“I was thinking of something I’d like to try with you,” Draco says, striding into the bedroom slowly, as he always does. Gracefully. His grey joggers riding low on his hips, the milky skin of his bare torso somehow even more enticing in the low light of Harry’s bedroom. Harry’s heart sighs at the view but does a little worried jump at the words._

_“Something I’d like to try” can mean one of two options._

_Option one would be Draco wants to find a way around his_ Unspeakableness. _Harry knows he’s one, they’ve signed some ridiculous paperwork that says he’s allowed on grounds of their_ personal relationship _. He isn’t meant to know anything else, though. Draco can’t say much beyond ‘exciting day at work today’ or ‘I learnt something new at work’. It’s all a bit strange._

_Option two would be Draco wants to try a new thing in bed. If it happens to be this option, Harry is in for a very, very good night._

_As luck would have it, it ends up being the latter. Harry, as per usual, raises no objections — it’s not like he ever actually managed Occlumency that well. “Imagine how good it’ll be if you can hear my thoughts, baby. I won’t need to tell you how good you are for me. You’ll know I’m thinking it.”_

Or what it means when he dreams of the time Draco had helped Harry decorate Grimmauld Place for Christmas, mere days before the Bauble Incident.

_“These are all the decorations you have?” Draco asks, with a laugh. “Salazar, Harry. We need to go shopping.”_

_And they go shopping, and they stop at the robe shop and the gelato place in Hogsmeade. And Draco kisses him in the snow when no one is looking. And they’re happy._

_They go back to London, and Draco helps Harry cover the house in holly and pine, dried oranges and mistletoe._

_And Draco kisses him in front of the fireplace. And they’re happy._

Harry wishes he knew what it meant. He just needs to know. If he knew what it meant maybe he’d know how to stop it.


	18. Eighteenth of December

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> not me working on this chapter this morning with a facemask on, sipping on my coffee, asmr playlist playing in the background, wondering how much (affectionate) abuse i will have to endure by the time you get to the end of the chapter... 💅

_Marcos barges into Harry’s room in the middle of the night to tell him they can’t find Draco Malfoy._

_Harry hasn’t ran this far for this long in a very, very long time and his shins are starting to hurt like hell when he finally spots the familiar bright white hair inside a car in the parking lot on the far side of the resort. He runs over and yanks the door open._

_“Why are you in a bloody car, are you insane, Malfoy? Why are you not in your bed?”_

_“I DON’T KNOW, OKAY!!? I DON’T KNOW.”_

_“Scooch over,” Harry says, sitting next to Malfoy on the same seat and squeezing the door shut. Their thighs touch, separated only by the fabric of their shorts, and Harry is acutely aware of the fact that he is blatantly flirting with this curse now._

_“There are 4 other seats in this car, Potter. We don’t have to share.”_

_“God, you’re lively today, uh? Well, if there is someone following you, I don’t fancy an AK to the back, so I’m here now.” Then, “Why am I here?”_

_Draco blinks slowly, looks up from his hands to Harry, an unreadable look in his face._

_“I think I can show you without passing you the symptoms.”_

_“What!?”_

_“I can show you what it does!”_

_“You can’t touch me, Draco— the curse…”_

_Draco scoffs, then. His eyes are filled with something Harry doesn’t understand. In fact, Harry understands very little right now._

_“This isn’t real, Potter. I’m in your head. Do you want to know or not? You can send your Pensieve memories and describe better than I will, after. This may save everyone, Potter.”_

_“Fuck. Okay. What do you need me to do?”_

_“Don’t panic,” Draco says, as he grabs Harry’s hand, his index and middle finger on his pulse point by the wrist, and squeezes, lightly._

_He’s not sure what comes first: complete darkness or the infernal ringing in his ears, but he knows it’s definitely followed by his whole body going slack against the car door. He doesn’t have any control over his movements, but is surprised to be so lucid still. He’s reminded of his first encounter with a Dementor, back in 1994. The ringing is high and piercing, just like the memory of his mother’s screams. God. He’s sweating, panicking, but he can’t move, he can’t move, he can’t-_

_“Potter. Potter. Merlin, that’s awful.”_

_He can feel Draco’s hand on his still, but mostly he can feel the pain, it’s like a slow poison burning through his bloodstream, like a very localised Crucio, like… well, dying was infinitely more pleasant._

_It lasts a few minutes and then he’s back to himself, only more sore than he’s ever felt._

_He coughs, clears his throat. “So, that’s what it’s like.”_

_“I imagine so, yes.”_

_“Drac—”_

_“Don’t.”_

Then words are rushing out of his mouth, understanding dawning on him. He needs to interrogate Draco. Draco knows who cast the curse.

_“What else can you tell me? Draco. Can you tell me about it?”_

_Harry knows it’s not real now. It feels like half dream, half aggressive legilimency. He knows how good Draco is at it though, the many ways he can use it. And this is it. This is his Draco._

_“Pott—”_

_“Just tell me, Draco. You said it. This may save everyone.”_

_Draco looks pained, but resigned. His usually plump pink lips are but one fine line. When he finally speaks, it all comes out as one big wave of information._

_“It’s a combination of a ton of different spell work. Seven layers.”_

_“How do you—”_

_“I have notes in my desk drawer back in Mysteries. Bottom drawer. Ask them to get them. You’ll know how to fix it.”_

_“What do you mean?”_

_“I cast it.”_

_“Draco, wha—”_

_“Fix it. Please,” his voice wavers and Harry’s heart aches. And wants. “Harry.”_

And before he can say anything, before he can react to hearing his name in Draco’s lips for the first time in so very long, Harry is awake and Draco is not in his head.

He casts a _Tempus_ charm. 4:26am. Which means it’s just after seven back home. No one will be in Mysteries. No one that will listen to him or be able to help will be in the bullpen. But Hermione will be up. He knows he should wake someone up in the building, but he isn’t sure what to do yet.

His brain is reeling, he is sweaty. Fuck. Fuck. _Draco cast it on himself._

He knows he’ll get caught, but he doesn’t give a damn. He can save everyone. _He can save Draco._

He runs downstairs, and throws a handful of powder into the fireplace. It takes a couple of minutes, with the whole international connection thing but soon he is staring at Hermione and Ron’s living room. 

“‘Mione. Hermione? Ron! Rooooooon!” He shouts into the empty room.

Hermione comes running, cup of coffee in hand, in a smart pencil skirt but a fluffy pyjama top. “Oh my god, Harry? Are you okay?”

“Yes, yes. ‘Mione, I need you to go to the Ministry.”

“What?”

“I don’t know who you’ll have to talk to, but get Robards, or Kingsley, whatever you have to do. I need to get to the bottom drawer of the desk of the Unspeakable I have here with me. I need every note in that drawer Floo’d to me as soon as possible, Hermione. It’s a matter of life and death.”

Hermione looks drained with concern, like she doesn’t know what to do with herself.

“Harry, are you okay?”

“‘Mione, please. Yes. Do whatever needs done. Get me those notes. Please.”

She’s biting her lip in worry, in confusion. God knows what else. “Okay, okay. I’ll do what I can. Be safe?”

She asks because she always does, bless her.

“Will do. Hurry, Hermione.” And because he’s high on something, on this adrenaline, on the mere thought that he’ll save Draco, he adds: “I love you.”

And if she wasn’t worried before, she is now. “Love you!” She says back, and the connection cuts.

And now… he waits. 

Marília is the one to catch him out of bed. 

“Harry?” She asks into the dark room, walks in, a silk robe thrown over her tiny pyjamas. “Is that you?”

“Marília. Good. Yes, I was going to find one of you now.”

“What are you doing?”

“I know how to break the curse. Or… er, I will. I need some notes from my Ministry, I have just contacted my friend and she’s getting them to me, and then we can break this. We can do it!”

Marília has questions, of course, but she can probably tell Harry isn’t quite in his right mind. She forces him to sit at a table and leaves the room to make them a drink. Before he can even see the drinks, the smell of spices invades the room. She sets the two cups down on the table and Harry raises an eyebrow at her in surprise.

“It’s tea. Feels a bit early for wine,” she explains with a giggle. “It’s my grandmother’s recipe. We have something we call _Quentão_ here in Brazil. It’s a winter drink, similar to your mulled wines and ciders. My grandmother used to make us this when we were kids, since we couldn’t drink the alcoholic stuff. It became something I make when I’m stressed, or sad, or need a little comfort. Thought you may need it.”

And he honestly can’t say anything but “thank you.”

She looks at him without a word, but he knows he has to start talking. He is too emotional, too brash, too _himself,_ and it only occurs to him right then, sitting at the table sipping his tea that he has to explain how he knows they can do it. He has no answers right then but he isn’t willing to throw Draco under the bus. So, he has to make something up on the spot.

The back of his right hand itches, and he hears the words in his mind. “I must not tell lies.” 

“It’s an experimental spell, something my Ministry was working on. Especially Malfoy upstairs, it’s his Department. Something went wrong with it. But it should be easily fixable, so — not to worry.”

Harry is fully aware he is lying through his teeth, and he doesn’t exactly need his heart beating in his chest like a wildebeest stampede on their way to trample the king. And at that thought, he makes a small note to himself to stop spending all his free time watching animated films with Teddy.

Marília continues with her questioning and Harry puts on a brave face. He’s not good at this — the politics, the lying — but he can do it. For Draco, so they can go home. 

_Separately_ , he reminds himself. _Nothing has changed._


	19. Nineteenth of December

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short-ish and late one today because real life keeps getting in the way. How rude.  
> We're also going to ignore the very "slap the prompt on it and be done" approach I took today, yeah? Yeah.  
> Good Auror Harry James is back for a little, today... still moody, but going along for the ride lmao

Harry doesn’t sleep. Marília, Marcos, Lis, Isaac and Captain Rodrigues take turns helping, working backwards through Draco’s notes, but Harry doesn’t sleep. He can’t. 

As soon as Harry explains the situation as clearly as he can with the little information he has, Captain Rodrigues asks: “What were you even trying to achieve with this? Hopefully your Ministry knows not to play with magic after this.” Fuck if Harry knows. Fuck if anyone but Draco knows. 

Draco’s notes are, at least, thorough. Harry will have to thank him for that, although it is really not surprising at all and he knows that, if he were to mention it, Draco would act like it was nothing. “Just doing my job, Potter. Someone has to, around these parts.”

Harry wonders what Draco is like, in his midnight blue robes, down in Mysteries. He doesn’t even know what subdepartment Draco works in, he hadn’t been assigned one yet when they broke up. Harry knows he had wanted Death or Time, but there have been rumours in the past couple of years that they have new subdepartments too, so for all Harry knows, that could be where Draco ended up. Either way, he’s grateful for Draco’s notes.

It takes a lot of work. Harry has known that Draco is clever, brilliant, intelligent and wonderfully bright. He’s known it for a long, long time. But he hadn’t realised just _how bright._

Draco has named the curse _Aeternus Solem_ , if Harry is assuming correctly that the thrice underlined words at the top of the parchment are the name of the spell. 

The curse itself — _not a curse, just a botched spell,_ he has to keep reminding himself — has seven different layers to it and Harry is pleased he was, at least, somewhat right. There is partial obliviation and a modification of the Imperius that isn’t quite as severe (and cleverly _just-legal_ ). There’s also a spell version of a Draught of the Living Death — and fuck the Department of Mysteries and whatever dodgy shit they do down there, how on earth did Draco manage _that_?

On top of the obliviation, mild coercion and draught of the living death spells, there is a fraction of a calming spell, a Confundus charm, a cheering spell, and, most bizarrely of all, a location spell.

It must have made sense to Draco, but it doesn’t to anyone in the briefing room that day. It looks like the most illogical, randomly picked cocktail of magic and yet Harry knows it can’t be. The notes are too precise, Draco himself is too picky for it to be random. It had made sense to Draco. Harry just hopes it will soon make sense for him too.

Harry wishes Draco would have told him more, told him how to go from here, how to undo it all, layer by layer. It would all be easier if he felt like he was good enough — like he is a good enough Auror, a good enough Curse Breaker to pull this off. 

So, he tries harder. He works through all the pieces of parchment Hermione miraculously managed to get him from Draco’s desk. The ones that have wand movements, the ones that have latin and greek words that Harry just about understands, the ones that have every layer of this awful, awful spell that Harry doesn’t understand what it was meant to do.

Draco could have given him more information. When he said he cast it, Harry had assumed he meant he had cast it on himself. But Draco is brilliant — why would he cast an experimental, untested spell on himself in an open environment without supervision? And this far away from home? Why would he risk that? It is the logical conclusion because it explains how they couldn’t find any traces of foreign magic on Draco or any of the other people fallen victim to the spell. Draco had cast it on himself so there was only ever his magic. Harry settles for that theory, for now. He doesn’t really want to start considering the possibility that Draco meant he cast it on someone else. 

By the time they sit down for dinner, Harry encounters a hurdle he hadn’t realised he’d find: everyone else in this place regards Draco as a criminal. If he cast it, he ought to be locked up. It’s hard to lie as it is, Harry isn’t great at it in most circumstances. But it’s even harder when he has little information about what Draco intended to do. And even harder yet when he considers that he can’t explain to anyone what Draco’s job is and what it may entail. But Harry argues his case to every different person that raises the question.

At some point into the night, they have every little bit of information about the curse catalogued: every layer, every component, the final wand movement and the incantation. The only thing they still don’t know is exactly how it became contagious through touch and what exactly it was meant to do in the first place if it wasn’t meant to harm the way it ended up doing.

Harry starts crashing when he’s been awake for about forty hours, and Marcos has to drag him into bed, despite Harry throwing what he thinks is a _perfectly reasonable and warranted tantrum._

He’s unsure if it’s part of his exhaustion or one of the increasingly insane dreams he’s been having, if it’s because Draco had been in his mind and that’s messed him up or if it actually happens, but Marcos makes sure Harry climbs into bed, and just before he leaves he looks back at Harry and asks, tone as casual as always, _“You really care about this guy, uh?”_

Harry lets himself fall victim to the familiar feeling of the laundry, the softness of the bedsheet and the scent of the washing powder that reminds him of Pansy, of a Christmas four years ago, where Draco Malfoy had loved him enough to buy him a bauble because _“I saw it and thought of you, just something to make you think of me”_ (as if Harry ever stopped thinking of him) and helped him decorate every room in Grimmauld Place until it was shining with sparkly lights and candles. 

A December where Draco Malfoy had loved him and didn’t call him “Potter”, and had covered him in hot chocolate flavoured kisses and showed him how to decorate a gingerbread house the _proper_ way (and who could have guessed how good Draco was with a piping bag) and dragged him to the London Eye by the hand one evening just in time for the last ride so they could look at the lights and kiss with the entirety of London at their feet and not one worry in their hearts.


	20. Twentieth of December

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> dropping hints like crazy and making myself emotional over Draco Malfoy AND Teddy Lupin? just a classic Sunday for me.  
> also can't actually believe there is only five chapters left after this????? where the hell did ~~2020~~ december go?

December 20th dawns like none other Harry has ever experienced in his life. It takes him a while, in his grogginess, to remember where he is, why he is here and what has happened the day before. As soon as that all clicks into place, Harry is out of bed with a jump and running down to shower in what has to be a record time. He only realises when he’s running down the stairs two steps at a time to get to the conference room that he did not have any dreams the night before. 

Reinforcements have been called in, which, at this stage, only half offends Harry. He gets introduced to the Brazilian Curse Breaker that has been working on Draco’s notes all night and sits down to discuss how far they have gotten to at this point while he’s still washing his breakfast down with thirsty gulps of coffee.

The night team has established that the cheering and _Confundus_ Charm part of the “curse” will be easy to revert. They’re the simplest part of the truly odd mix they’re dealing with, and the easier to detach from the mess. The rest is too tangled and they’re not yet sure how to go from here. 

There is a part of Harry that is cautiously hopeful, while the other part is terrified to his very core that they’ll run out of time, even with Draco’s thorough if confusing notes. Draco hasn’t been awake since the night Harry sat by his window and described the sunset to him. 

There is a third part of Harry that is ready to barge into the Department of Mysteries and demand answers at wand point. Surely Draco wouldn’t have been working alone. Someone must have known about this. But they still sent Harry away to deal with something nearly impossible to figure out with no information at all. _And to think he was starting to consider maybe taking their constant job offers seriously._

He can’t stop thinking about them, the whole concept of a Department in a government building that is shrouded in secrecy. Stripped of its aura of mystery, its perceived prestige… it just sounds wrong. Not to mention that they still think they’re the _crème de la crème_ but Harry very clearly remembers breaking in when he was fifteen, along with a handful of fellow fifteen year olds. Hopefully they’ve done something about their security, at the very least.

In the next few hours, Harry throws all manner of revealing and anti-concealment charms at Draco’s notes, hoping there is something crucial they are missing, but he finds nothing except for a doodle or two along the margins.

The team keeps rotating — Harry seems to be the only one not willing to take breaks and he tries not to get too hung up on that. No one here has more to lose than he has.

When Isaac sits down next to him after lunch, Harry agrees to work on the memory charm and the Imperius since it seems he’s got more experience with those than most of the other people present, while everyone else takes a portion or two of the curse and tries to figure out what can be done.

If Harry is to be honest, there is something he is more confused about than what this Frankenstein’s Monster of a spell was meant to do in the first place, and that is the spell’s name and incantation. 

_Aeternus Solem_

Harry knows enough Latin to know what it means, but not enough to know _what it means._

_Aeternus._

Eternal. Forever. Everlasting. Neverending. Perpetual. Undying. Permanent. Immortal.

_Solem._

Sun. Big bright star that keeps us alive. The enormous fire ball in the sky. There’s not much else to that one.

A Sun that is Eternal. Whatever the fuck Draco means by that. It does ring a bell, in the back of his mind, but Harry just can’t _figure it out._

He stops dawdling on semantics and gets to work on the Memory Charm. He’s happy to. He spent enough time after the war trying to help Hermione figure out a way to bring her parent’s memories back. They’d tried everything, but a full Obliviate is irreversible, still to this day. However, Draco’s re-work on this particular spell doesn’t look like it should be. Draco has isolated and invalidated the part of the spell that makes it permanent by simply not making it an actual erasure of memory. All Draco’s spell does is raise a barrier between a specific memory and stop the brain from accessing it. Almost like it pin-points a specific subject and locks it away in a box, where it can’t be reached.

This gives them something to work with. He sits next to Lis and they figure out that’s probably where the tracking spell she’s working on comes in. Partial obliviation requires a kind of tracking spell that finds the specific memories you want gone and gets rid of them. This must be the same kind of thing. Harry just needs to figure out a way to reverse the obliviation, seeing as the memories, if he’s correct, are still inside the victim’s brains. They just can’t access them.

That ticks another item off their list and frees one more brain to look at the main spell components: the location spell isn’t relevant and doesn’t need reversing if its only purpose is to guide the bastardised version of an Obliviate Draco has created.

And the day, much like the day before, goes like that. Harry refuses to take proper breaks to eat, munching on crisps and sandwiches and snacks while he looks at Draco’s and his own notes, and when he’s told he’s probably done his quota of work for the day, he refuses to go to bed.

He eventually agrees by two in the morning, when an ecstatic Curse Breaker whose name he can’t remember announces that, putting all their work together, they know how to reverse the curse and they’ll start doing so first thing after breakfast in the morning.

Harry falls into bed with a conflicting mix of feelings in his heart, but mostly, he thinks that Draco will be safe, and that maybe he will get to see Teddy for Christmas. 

Thinking about Teddy usually makes things easier. Teddy needs Harry. And Harry is privileged enough to be godfather to the most wonderful child that has ever existed. He’s all Marauder, in temperament, which is unsurprising when you consider Remus _and_ Tonks’ reputation. But he’s so much more than that. He’s clever, and he has almost full control over his metamorphmagi abilities at age nine. He changes his hair and eyes to look like Harry’s, steals his glasses and does a wicked impression of him that always ends up with Ron laughing so much he’s crying. At Christmas, he always wants Harry and Andromeda to open their presents from him first, and he always insists Harry and him pull a Christmas cracker together and even though Teddy somehow gets the prize end nearly every time, it’s always Harry who ends up with the paper crown on his head.

Most things are worth it, for Teddy. For when Teddy asks Harry to tell him work stories and Harry has to wrack his brain for anything that is remotely child-appropriate. And for when Teddy looks at Harry with bright amber eyes that remind him painfully of Remus and tells Harry “It’s so cool that you’re an Auror, like my mum.” 

Harry isn’t sure that being an Auror is _cool._ But he knows he should be proud that his mission is very nearly accomplished. Even if it will be hard to take Draco back to England and forget that he got to be this close to him again, he should be proud. _He should be._


	21. Twenty-First of December

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welcome to episode 21 of "mari has lost the will to live at this point, harry needs to stop being fucking emo and also this is a very abstract use of the prompt and she hopes no one minds"

Harry wakes up to a knock on his door and, for some reason, bolts out of bed thinking it might be Draco. It obviously isn't. But it is Captain Rodrigues, informing him that most of the team is finishing breakfast. He had apparently decided Harry needed the rest and not wanted to wake him up, but Marcos had been adamant that Harry should cast the reverse spell on his fellow Ministry-worker or at least be present for it.

He wonders when, exactly, he became this transparent. But he is grateful, so he doesn’t complain. He showers and manages to steal a few pieces of bread and fruit before following the team of Healers and MagiPolícia up to Draco’s room. 

It has been agreed that Draco should be the first to receive the counter-spell attempt. Firstly, because he is their first victim, has been under the spell the longest and is the one suffering from the effects of the curse the most severely. Secondly, because he cast it. So, if all goes well and he starts to recuperate immediately, they can call it a success and move on to the other victims, with, perhaps, some assistance from Draco himself. 

Entering Draco’s room as part of this odd procession doesn’t make Harry’s heart feel any lighter than it did when the Captain knocked on his door that morning, but Harry is so close. _They’re so close._

Draco’s hair is matted, there’s a sheen of sweat on his forehead, a light tremble to his hands still. Harry goes over eighteen days of work in his mind, over hundreds of diagnostic spells, witness statements, colourful notes in his thick file. He analyses the dream, Draco’s notes crammed into leaf upon leaf of parchment in his tidy small handwriting. 

_Aeternus Solem_

He’ll have to ask Draco what it means. What he wanted it to do. But first, he has to _save_ Draco.

Marcos is the first to speak once they settle in the room. “Harry?” Harry just looks back at him. “You ready?” He nods.

The healers settle on one side of Draco’s bed — ready to cast if anything goes awry — while Harry takes the other — sweaty and abuzz with nervous energy.

Lis goes over the spells necessary, reading off the piece of paper with the notes they compiled late last night. Talks him one last time through incantation, wand movement, where to point, when not to falter. It’s almost like a ritual, they’re not exactly separate spells anymore — they have to be cast in this specific sequence for it to work. _If_ it works.

Harry looks at Draco’s face, his eyebrows drawn, his body impossibly pale and still, and he nods, as if he’s nodding at Draco, as if Draco can see him, as if he’s getting the permission that he so desperately needs. And then, he grabs his wand out of the holster and starts casting. 

He swallows the lump on his throat down as he does, moving carefully, slowly, with intent. 

After a couple of minutes, to a room of complete and utter silence, the steely grey eyes of one Draco Malfoy blink open, slowly and stare back at Harry.

It comes out in a croak, but it’s Draco through and through: “You brilliant bastard, you fucking did it.”

And if a tear or two he didn’t know he was holding back slip out of his eyes and slide down his cheeks, no one notices in the commotion of celebrating and making sure Draco is actually okay.

No one lingers, so Harry doesn’t either, as much as he’d like to. He stays long enough for the Healers to confirm there is no sign of the curse left in Draco and that he should get back to full health in a few days, with a strict regimen of potions and rest. Just long enough for the Healers to determine Draco needs rest before getting questioned. Long enough to witness Draco refuse the Dreamless Sleep but take the standard sleeping potion with gratitude. Harry knows he’ll be out at least until the early evening if not for the rest of the day in its entirety.

His many mantras, his many looping thoughts of the past two and half weeks get easily replaced by only one thought: _Draco’s fine, Draco’s safe._

Harry doesn’t perform the counter-spell again. The team takes turns and, in a few hours, the resort is in jubilant exaltation.

It is the Friday before Christmas, so, as soon as the officers manage to get in touch with their families, the resort is flooded with reunions.

By late afternoon, Harry is surrounded by what almost feels like _family_ with a stomach full of the most delicious barbecued meat he has ever tasted in his entire life (just what do they feed their cows in Brazil? He must know). 

There had been a moment, when Marília’s husband and children walked out of the Floo and into her arms, that Harry had felt jealous. He’d felt it in his heart, the pang of hurt. And he doesn’t even have a husband, he doesn’t even have a boyfriend. But he has Ron and Hermione. And he doesn’t have a child, not really. But he does have Teddy and Rosie. _And he misses them._

But it does pass quicker than he expected it to. He’s handed a _Caipirinha_ that absolutely changes his life and makes him wonder just what kind of shit they put in their cocktails back in London because it has never tasted this good before. 

Harry isn’t sure if it’s part relief but he is certain, that night, that he’s had the best meal of his life. He tries the fried plantain, every cut of barbecued meat from the steaks to the rumps to the cubed chunks of beef skewered with vegetables. There’s rice, beans, _farofa_ (which he was suspicious of at first having never heard of yuca flour, but he’s now wondering just where in London he’d be able to find it), barbecued pineapple and pão de queijo.

He realises then, amidst the relief and the joy, as he tells the people he’s essentially lived with for the past eighteen days, that this is the first time he’s opened up fully, the first time he’s allowed himself to tell people about his friends, his family, Teddy and Andromeda. He realises, really, that he’s been a right dick. But, judging by the way everyone treats him, he’s forgiven. 

Before he gets in bed that night, he gets word from the Ministry informing them that a Portkey is being sorted for himself and _“Unspeakable D.L.M.”_ for the morning of the twenty-third of December. 

And falling asleep is easy that night, with the heavy lump of fear that had weighed down his heart gone, a full stomach and the light buzz of the cachaça making his body tingle. And in that haze, just before he passes out, Harry looks around this little room that’s housed him for the past two and a half weeks and discovers that, for the first time in a very long time, he doesn’t just miss Hermione and Ron or Teddy and Rosie. He misses home. He misses his things. The feeling of his own washing — done the muggle way but dried with magic, every time. The cosy blankets Andromeda and Molly had knitted for him throughout the years. A space that holds good and bad memories in equal measure, but that is his. 

Even if he knows that it won’t be easy to leave Draco, he’s going home to his bed, just like he was dreaming of before this whole mess started.


	22. Twenty-Second of December

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is a looooong chapter compared to everything i've posted so far due to the sprinkle of _much needed communication_ (oooooooh!!!!)  
> also, anyone spot that "only one bed" tag? yeah? okay good. lovely. you go on now, then x

As soon as Harry manages to offer just enough to satisfy the Brazilian corps without actually giving them any relevant information, Draco says he wants to leave the resort. 

It takes a great deal of bickering and back and forth, but in the end Harry agrees to spend their last night in Brazil in a hotel in the city, close to the centre and the portkey office. Draco looks weak and out of place still but Harry is patient with both Draco and the vulture in his own chest, eating away at the hope.

He makes sure all things are wrapped up and they can finally check out of the resort, leaves with a few recipes in his pocket and a weird, bittersweet sense of companionship, even if he knows he has not been at his best behaviour the whole time. 

Draco books the hotel, speaking on the phone in semi-fluent Portuguese, which forces Harry to make a hasty escape from Draco’s room for some fresh air. The French had been bad enough, back in the day, but that sweet, musical cadence of Brazilian Portuguese rolling off Draco’s tongue? _Fuck._

Marcos drives them into the city in what’s mostly a silent, awkward drive. Harry’s thoughts float through his mind at a million miles an hour. Between the lies that have fallen out of his lips almost naturally the past couple of days and all the questions he has that Draco hasn’t answered, he doesn’t have time to try and bridge a conversation between Marcos and Draco, so he just remains silent and looks out of the window. 

They get dropped off at the exact same spot Harry got picked up when he first arrived, and that’s just the first parallel and feeling of _déjà vu_ that Harry experiences that day. Walking down the street in Fortaleza reminds Harry of walking down the street in Hogsmeade. 

Fortaleza is bright and cheery and warm, while Hogsmeade had been grey in a positive way, covered in snow and scents like cinnamon and roasted chestnuts. Despite the obvious difference, he feels the exact same pull he felt back then, the desperate need to touch Draco, except back then they couldn’t because of the press, and now they can’t because of everything else. Draco does allow Harry to take his arm as they cross the street, to keep him steady. He looks a little tired, but he’s mostly back to normal after the ridiculous amount of potions he’s been prescribed.

To say it is a surprise that, when they arrive at the hotel, Harry realises Draco has only booked one room for them to share, would be an understatement. And, as fate would have it, there is only one bed.

Harry forces Draco to get in bed as soon as they get in the room, not commenting on the fact that it is only one for the two of them and goes in the shower. He didn’t want to agree with Draco when he’d said they had to get out of the resort, but he gets it now. 

Obviously, it hadn’t been a near-death experience for Harry — he’s had enough of those — but it had certainly been _an experience._

And even though Draco looks weak, and skinnier than ever, and has deep dark circles under his eyes that painfully remind Harry of Sixth Year, it feels good being out of the resort.

There was an aura of darkness in that building. Not evil, but heavy. Nightmarish. Painful. A reminder of how much could have gone wrong hanging in the air. Harry realises with shock that he knows exactly what it felt like. It felt like carrying that cursed locket around his neck for days on end, until the sword and Ron showed up.

Harry keeps thinking about how much he doesn’t know. How much he has lied in the past handful of days. He wants answers and he knows he shouldn’t attempt to get them out of Draco. Not while he’s so fragile, but he must know. He needs to know.

Draco is awake when Harry emerges from his shower wearing only a loose pair of joggers. He hasn’t considered Draco may mind this, after seeing Harry in shorts and t-shirts instead of his usual wine red robes, but Draco makes a weird squawk-like noise on the back of his throat when he sees Harry and Harry tries to be as casual as possible as he retrieves a t-shirt from his suitcase and puts it on.

He sits, gingerly, on the very edge on the bed, as far from Draco as possible. Draco is under the sheet, looking entirely too young for some of the thoughts that had crossed Harry’s mind in the shower.

He’s wondering where to start, so he goes with what he needs to know most, before he loses his head:

“Err, so. It was really you, wasn’t it? In my head? You showed me how to fix it all.” 

“Well, I was rather desperate,” Draco says, not meeting his eye.

“Right, of course.” 

“You were always really receptive to legilimency. It took me a few days to manage it while semi-unconscious, but it was easy once you started letting me in.”

Harry was quite receptive to Draco being in his head. Only they used to use it for sex, rather than saving lives and solving crimes. Harry bites the inside of his cheek to stop himself from saying that it was rather a lot more fun having Draco in his head dropping filthy fantasies, than making him chase him and experience the effects of a stupid curse, which brings him to his next question.

“Right, yeah. Makes sense. What were you trying to do with that spell, exactly?”

And Draco’s expression does drop then.

“Well, I can’t tell you, can I?” And, the thing is, Harry knows Draco. No matter how much has changed in the past 4 years, no matter what’s happened, he knows Draco. And he knows Draco is lying.

“So what you’re saying is you don’t want to tell me,” Harry says.

“Don’t play stupid, Potter,” and he does look Harry in the eye then, hard and unmoving.

But Harry’s had enough and he decides he’ll play this little Poker game right back. If that’s what Draco wants, that’s what he’ll have. 

“I am not. I think the Ministry doesn’t know about your mystery curse, Draco. Because if they did, they would have told me and not sent me here, in December, on a wild goose chase!”

“Harry.”

He wonders if the voice is only in his head for a second. But it’s not, he’s heard it, clear as day, he’s seen Draco’s lips move. And it hurts more than it has any right to, _fuck._

“What were you trying to do, then?” He presses, ignoring the vulture clawing at his chest now, ripping skin open.

“Are you asking me, or is this for your report?” Draco asks quickly, and his eyes flick up to the file Harry had placed on the short coffee table on the other side of the room. Never misses a thing, that Draco Malfoy.

“I am asking you. Whether or not it goes on the report is something I’ll have to decide later, but I won’t write anything you don’t want me to.”

He _should not_ have said that.

“Well, I suppose there is a disclosure form that we never bothered informing Mysteries was void about four years ago. And you did take a vow.”

“I did wonder about that. I was expecting to get Obliviated.” And he had, really, pretty much every day for at least the first year. He’s not really meant to know about Draco’s job if they’re no longer in a relationship.

“Well, you’re… you,” Draco says, quietly. As if that explains anything. A beat passes. Then, in response to Harry’s silence, Draco adds: “I trust you. I knew you wouldn’t break that vow.”

_“I trust you.” Not trusted, you. Trust. Present tense. Jesus._

“Do you trust me now?”

“Well. I must, because I wouldn’t tell you what I am about to if I didn’t.”

And, after almost three weeks — well, 27 years — of this bullshit, Harry knows he shouldn’t be surprised, but he is.

Every word of Draco’s feels like a slow, stabbing pain in his heart and he doesn’t know what to make of it. Draco tells him about the Dream Room, the subdepartment that he runs. Draco Malfoy runs his own subdepartment down in Mysteries, and Harry knows — really knows — that he is brilliant at it.

“I was trying to forget things. Dreams. I was trying to come up with something that would make me forget.”

And Harry’s breath catches in his lungs, his words get stuck on his tongue. _What are you trying to forget?_ He wants to ask. _I’ve not managed to forget you._

“So… that was your research.”

It’s a statement, but he waits for Draco to say something, he waits for confirmation, for _something._

“Yes.”

“Why here?” Harry asks, finally. One of the questions he most desperately needs an answer for. 

“Well, I came all the way here, and I still couldn’t forget.”

There is something about the way Draco says those words that makes Harry’s skin crawl and he jumps off the bed without really wanting to. 

Draco looks hurt, but Harry can’t stay. It’s too much. Whatever Draco is trying to forget, doesn’t concern him. It’s been four years. He’s saved Draco. He must move on.

“I… I’m gonna get some fresh air,” he says, scrambling for an excuse. “You should try and sleep. Do you want me to order you some room service for when you wake up or do you want snacks?”

“Snacks. I don’t think I can stomach a full meal.”

Understandable. It happens when you’ve not eaten properly in days.

“Okay, what should I get y-”

“You know what I like.” And with that, Draco sinks down into the bed and turns his back to Harry and the door, and Harry doesn’t want to, but he forces himself to make his escape.

Harry finds the smoking area out in the courtyard of the hotel pretty quickly. _Thank Merlin._ It’s a Muggle hotel, so he has to be careful unshrinking his cigarettes and decides it’s probably safer to try and borrow a lighter than attempt to sneakily light it up with his wand. _When did he become this reliant on magic?_

He leans on the edge of the short wall that separates the smoking area from the café side of the courtyard, with its outdated glass tables and tin napkin holders. The hotel isn’t busy, he guesses maybe because it’s the 22nd of December. People are busy, shopping, cooking, being with their loved ones.

 _Their loved ones._ There’s a weight very deep in his chest at the thought that he can go home tomorrow, and see Hermione and Ron and Rosie and the rest of the Weasleys at The Burrow. He can see Teddy open his presents. He can be there for the annual Boxing Day pickup game. He can see Charlie, and tell him about Brazil. Maybe this is the year they’ll finally meet whoever it is that Ginny has been secretly dating.

But, that means leaving Draco. Which he always knew would come. He’d break the curse, finish his report, take Draco back to Britain, and, well, go back to his miserable lonely life.

The thing is, he hadn’t been aware of his life being this miserable or lonely. He had been sad, at times. Nostalgia hit him hard sometimes, that longing for something he used to have and can’t have anymore. But he used to be okay. Maybe not quite content. But okay. Seeing Draco, realising that Draco could die on his watch and he’d never know how much Harry still loved him had been the issue. That had changed everything.

He sighs, stubs his fag out and looks at his watch. It’s only 4 in the afternoon, but his hours have been messed up since he got here so he doesn’t see any problem with having a Caipirinha at the bar before he heads up to finish his report. It would be a shame to miss out on a proper one before he gets back to the sugary watery mess they attempt to pass as a Caipirinha back in London.

He grabs more food than it’s strictly needed but he doesn’t want to order room service if Draco isn’t having any, so he gets on the lift all the way up to the 4th floor after a few more Caipirinhas than he should have had in the short time he was downstairs for. 

It feels weird to sneak into the room silently while Draco is asleep, but he tries not to think about it. He tries not to think about Draco, in fact, which is a stupid thing to do when he can see the Draco-shaped lump under the bedsheet and he is literally writing Draco’s name on the report forms. 

The report is probably going to be screened by the Department of Mysteries first and end up with half of the information redacted to the eyes of anyone who doesn’t work down there in the catacombs, so he doesn’t know why he bothers.

But he writes it all down, anyway. “Experimental magic developed by Unspeakable D.L.M. as part of research for the Department of Mysteries.” “Accidental exposure to civilians controlled by Auror H.J.P. and Brazilian force by 21/12/07.” And that’s how far he is willing to go. They never need extensive reports from International Missions unless the problem escalates or never gets resolved. The Brazilian force isn’t likely to ask any more questions after Harry artfully came up with excuse after excuse for Draco’s stupid fucking spell. He’s pretty certain no one will care.

It takes him a couple hours in the end, but he’s happy with it. All the relevant information is in, all the details are out. Fuck knows if Robards’ will even be allowed to read the report. Mysteries are, well, _a mystery_ like that. Sometimes things just… disappear when they get involved. Somewhat like Harry and Draco’s relationship. Disappeared, almost like it never happened in the first place.

Harry eats some fresh fruit because he doesn’t think he can bear anything more substantial and he’s attempting to settle for a snooze on the small settee when Draco wakes up. “Hey,” he says, voice raspy.

“Oh. How are you feeling?” Harry asks, sitting up, letting the blanket slide off his body and onto the floor.

“You’re here. I wasn’t sure you were, really. I thought the whole thing may have been a dream, for a second.”

“Well, from what I gathered, you’re the dream specialist, but if this is a dream, it’s one of the most fucked up I had. And I’ve had a lot of fucked up dreams.” Harry says. Draco’s face remains the same but he does a little snort of laughter, that warms Harry to the core.

Draco used to find him funny, in his self-deprecation and dark humour. He used to make Draco laugh. He remembers making Draco laugh for the first time like it was yesterday. Realising he had heard Draco’s laugh before — he’d been the butt of many of Draco’s jokes — but had never been the one to make him laugh. 

Harry gets Draco a glass of water. Shows him the truly ridiculous selection of snacks he got. Draco, unexpectedly, asks for the little plastic tub with chunks of pineapple and for a brigadeiro. 

“Gotta get this body used to sugar again, I guess. It won’t do to quit the habit.” And, this time, it’s Harry who’s laughing.

They sit in a silence that isn’t awkward or weird or uncomfortable. Not that it is exactly comfortable, either. 

“Are you tired?” Harry asks, in the end, when he gets too in his head about Draco and how _close_ they are. Sure, there’s been a lot of physical closeness in the past few days but Draco is conscious and lucid and not under the effects of a ridiculous experimental spell. 

Draco is less than a meter away from him, on this bed, and he hasn’t told Harry off. He hasn’t told him to go back to the couch or to stop looking at him. 

And he can’t blame Harry for looking. For getting his fill. It’s out of place and it feels like his heart has just been plunged into a bucket of freezing water, but he wants to look. Because he can see a thin strip of skin between Draco’s t-shirt and the bedsheet — a spot of hip that he knows his hand fits around perfectly. And he can see a little cluster of freckles on Draco’s bicep that seem to stand out a little more now he is tanned, right there where Harry used to hold on to. And he knows that, under the bed sheet are Draco’s legs — the sensitive spot behind his knee, the tattoo that wraps itself around his thigh, where Harry’s fingers would ghost over on his way up, up, up—

_Fuck._

“Well. As tired as one can expect to be after being under that spell for…” and he stops and does his concentration face, tongue peeking out to wet his bottom lip “hmm, four weeks?”

“Nearly five.” Harry confirms. “Right. I wanted you to read my report, see if you’re okay with what I wrote. But it doesn’t have to be right now,” Harry says, feeling awkward.

He already knows how much he’s going to crash as soon as he’s back home, spending Christmas surrounded by couples and the child who is technically his but, well, not _his. How much it’s going to hurt not seeing Draco every day, knowing saving his life didn’t change anything._ His plan is to owl the report in together with a holiday request effective immediately or, if necessary, a leave of absence. 

And he’ll take his time. He’ll do something for himself. He will go to a club on New Year’s and spend it wrapped around a brunette for a change. If there are plenty of beautiful horny men willing to be taken home by strangers on any random night, the holidays are exactly that amplified ten times over. Maybe he will do some travelling or something dumb like that. 

He knows it’s unfair to miss home so badly and not miss his life at all. He misses Ron and Hermione, he does. But home shouldn’t feel lonely. And it does. Suffocatingly so.

And he is thrown straight into the deep end to find out that he’d rather be here, in this mediocre hotel room, with his ex boyfriend who has long moved on and is a painful reminder of how much he’s lost and all the friends he doesn’t see anymore. His ex boyfriend who doesn’t look him in the eye and is quite obviously going through something as well — something that warrants experimental dream memory spells. He’d rather be here than at home, surrounded by his family. 

He passes the file to Draco without a word and makes an escape for the balcony without so much as an “excuse me.” He grabs a cigarette and lights it with his wand — Statute of Secrecy be damned. He takes a long drag and attempts to exhale all these feelings he’s got stuck in him out with the smoke. Predictably, it doesn’t work. So he does it again, and again, and tries not to think of Draco which seems like a stupid thing to do and tries not to look at Draco which is fine, until the cigarette is gone and he can’t bear even the idea of lighting a second one.

He stands in the humid evening air for a few more minutes. Focuses on the lights in the other rooms, wonders who else is at this hotel on Christmas week and if they feel as lost as he does. He gathers his thoughts, which are a mixture of “why does this keep happening to me” and “he’s so beautiful” and a lot of “look at that twelve year old who killed a fucking basilisk, _look at him now._ ” And he re-enters the room as soon as he can because the only thing that can stop him from crying is the shame of having to do it in front of Draco.

“Back on that, are you?” Draco says, without looking up from the report.

Ah. The smoking talk. 

“Well, yes. I was barely off them when yo—” _Left? Broke my heart? Decided that I wasn’t worth the effort? Had enough? “_ Four years ago. That mission ended up being pretty stressful.”

“The mission.” Draco deadpans. Like he knows what Harry isn’t saying. And maybe he does know. 

“Yeah.” Harry is horrified at how much it comes out as a sigh rather than a word. “The mission.”

Draco approves the report. “You’re good at that. I assume you still hate paperwork. But you’re good.”

There’s a silence hanging between them and Harry wants to grab the bedsheets, pull Draco into him by the wrists and tell him how badly he wished he was good.

“You’re a good Auror, Harry.”


	23. Twenty-Third of December

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i do feel a little mean for pointing out that "only one bed" tag and then they never ended up sharing the bed.  
> hopefully this will suffice as an apology?  
> (i keep re-writing and changing stuff around so this is like half beta'd, so... sorry about that)

His back is killing him when he wakes up to the sounds of pain and discomfort. He very nearly loses his balance and falls on his face with how quickly he jumps off the settee and runs for the bed.

“Malfoy? Draco? Can you hear me?”

When Draco doesn’t reply, Harry does the unthinkable and reaches out. His hand practically burns as soon as it connects with Draco’s arm and shakes, his heart does somersaults in his chest. Luckily, Draco wakes up pretty quickly.

“Shit. Sorry.” Draco says, voice caught in his throat.

“Let me get you some water,” Harry says and turns for the bathroom. It’s not selfless at all, he needs to get away from Draco. He needs to get out of this room, out of this hotel, out of this fucking country. 

Being around Draco is messing with his mind.

When he passes Draco the glass of water, he watches him drink, greedily. Watches a lone drop of water fall from his lips, watches the movement of his throat. And he is _gone at the sight._

“See why I thought my little spell was clever? Was hoping for less of this.”

“I’m sorry,” Harry replies. Because he is. “Do you need anything else?” He says, and dims his Lumos slightly.

“Pot— Harry?”

“Yeah?”

“Would you sleep in the bed with me?”

“I don’t think that’s a g—”

“Please.”

And the thing is, Draco Malfoy doesn’t say please often. And he never, ever says please like that, with a tremble of his lip and a quiver in his voice. That’s more of a Harry Potter thing, truth be told. 

And Harry is so overcome with emotion that he just does what’s asked of him. He gets in bed, entirely too aware of the fact that he can smell Draco’s shampoo — he still uses the same — and that, if he tried, he could scooch over and have his body touch Draco’s.

Spoon him, like he used to. 

He fights the urge to, but, as he falls asleep, he feels a sweaty, cold hand that his body recognises as familiar wrap itself around his.

In the morning, Harry finds himself asking, quite possibly for the tenth time, “Are you sure we should Portkey?” 

“Potter, please. I want to be home for Christmas as much as you do. You can hold my hand, if that would make you feel better.”

And _holy fuck,_ Harry is not about to pass that one up. He probably reaches for Draco’s hand quicker than he should have, but it’s been a trying few days. Draco doesn’t look at him directly, but he could swear he sees a little smile curling at Draco’s lips.

He has shrunk both his luggage and Draco’s so he can carry both cases and keep an eye on Draco, who is still looking slightly peaky and weak.

“I really think we should get a flight home, you know?” He says, for what is probably the tenth time, too.

“Yes, Potter, I think sitting in a small space for twelve hours is exactly what I need right now. If you wanna get a flight, be my guest. I am getting this Portkey home so I can get in bed as soon as possible, and still get pissed on red wine tomorrow.”

“You can’t have wine!” He splutters, and it makes Draco laugh.

“Loosen up, Potter. I know. I am well aware of what I managed to get myself into, thank you very much. That was well worth it just to see you have that little freak out, though.”

And Harry smiles as he tightens the grip around Draco’s hand and waits for the countdown to start for their Portkey, even though he knows he shouldn’t.

It comes as no surprise that it is awkward when they land back in the Portkey Office in London. First, it’s cold enough to freeze your balls off and they’re both standing there with no coats on surrounded by everyone in their December best. Second, it’s Christmas Eve Eve and everyone around them seems in a rush to get where they need to be, bags and parcels in hand. Thirdly, it feels like being dunked in a bucket of ice cold water — being back in Britain with Draco. Like everything that has happened in the past twenty days was but a fever dream.

Harry clears his throat, unsure where to go from there, but it’s Draco who breaks the silence. 

“Are you going to the Ministry, then?”

Whatever Harry was expecting, it wasn’t that.

“No. I’m gonna owl my report in and tell them to go fuck themselves. I need a week off. Two, probably,” he says with a shrug.

Harry doesn’t realise what he’s said. To whom he’s said it. Not until Draco’s eyes go impossibly wide and his mouth goes limp before he can school his reaction. 

Oh. Oh. _Fuck._

He’s still stuck on “You’re a good Auror, Harry.” A constant stream on the back of his mind. _“You’re a good Auror, Harry.”_ Like a prayer. _“You’re a good Auror, Harry.”_ In a way, it’s all he’s ever wanted Draco to tell him.

“I see,” Draco says, slowly. As if he, too, is lost for words.

“Are you going?” He asks, because he needs to think about something that isn’t the admission that he needs time off.

“Where?”

“The Ministry.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Potter, I’m on bedrest.”

Harry realises then, with a horrible sinking feeling at the bottom of his stomach, that he doesn’t know where Draco lives. Is he still at the penthouse with Pansy and Blaise? Is he back at the Manor, now that his dad is gone? Has he got a house? A flat? Where does he live?

He shifts on his feet a little, looks down at his hands, still carrying both bags. “Do you want me to Apparate you home?”

When he looks back up, Draco looks shy yet determined. Unsure, timid — almost like they all did back in Eight Year, way before Pansy had forced the famous Potter/Malfoy truce of 1999.

“Will you bring me to yours?” He finally asks.

Harry blinks, slowly. Exhales, carefully. Anything to avoid breaking the moment.

“Errr… of course,” he says even though he doesn’t really mean to say “of course.” He means to ask “why?” or “are you serious right now?” or “if you come to my house we’re going to have to talk about… things.”

Draco’s looking serious again, expression impassive.

“I just don’t fancy going back and explaining all this to Pansy.”

Ah. _Pansy._

“Yeah, sure. I’ve got the room. I don’t reckon I’ll be doing much for Christmas at this rate. Feel like I need to sleep for a long time.” He doesn’t add that he felt like that at the beginning of the month, when he got sent to Brazil.

Draco’s mouth curls in a sly smile that has no business being as hot as it is. “Well, I know a spell for that.”

Harry’s mouth falls open without him really intending for it to do.

“What the fuck is wrong with you, Malfoy?” Harry asks, but Draco is still smiling.

Harry walks out of the Portkey office carrying both cases with Draco trailing behind him. It’s a short walk to the closest Apparition point, but he doesn’t like the idea of Draco catching a cold, so he casts a Warming Charm and makes sure Draco is following him. He moves fast around the Christmas crowds, dodging big families with ridiculous amount of children, men in suits walking faster than it should be legal to and people who could really do with a Lightening Spell to help them with all the bags and boxes they’re carrying.

Harry rarely ends up in this side of town, except for the Portkey office, but as he walks down the small path towards the alley that hides the Apparition point he spots the skating rink in the distance. 

He’d brought Teddy to try ice skating last year, with Andromeda. Teddy had taken to it immediately and developed an impressive speed, while Andromeda laughed and made fun of Harry for worrying and surreptitiously casting protective spells around his godson. For a second right then, it feels like Christmas.

But before he can even consider Christmas for all its redeeming qualities, he has to focus on the issue at hand. _Taking his ex-boyfriend home with him._ Because that's a normal thing to do, of course.

Harry Apparates them home, makes them grilled cheese sandwiches (thank Merlin for stasis charms keeping his bread and cheese from going stale and mouldy), and makes the bed for Draco in the spare bedroom where Teddy usually sleeps.


	24. Twenty-Fourth of December

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> good morning, I CANNOT WAIT for Santa to bring me coal for Christmas 😈

Harry doesn’t hear the door creak open or click closed, and he doesn’t hear the steps as Draco approaches his bed, a few hours after they’d said goodnight and headed to their respective bedrooms.

Draco doesn’t ask, this time. There’s no unsteady “please,” no tentative patting of the bed, no big open silvery eyes breaking all the barriers Harry attempts to put up. The Muggle alarm clock on Harry’s bedside table tells him it’s just after three in the morning when Draco slides into his bed.

It’s weird. It’s everything Harry has thought about, in this very bed, most nights for the past four years. And now it is finally happening, and it _feels_ weird.

Harry’s mind is swimming with questions he wants to ask. Realistically, he knows that this doesn’t mean the same to Draco that it does to him. He knows Draco is fragile and weak and has just gone through something incredibly traumatic and probably just needs some comfort… a human presence. But then — why not Pansy? _Why Harry?_ It is hard to come up with reasons why he shouldn’t be doing this when Draco’s body is right there against his, soft, and warm, and lovely, and the feeling is just pulling him back to sleep.

In the morning, when Harry wakes up again, it takes every little bit of his strength not to work himself into a panic when he realises he’s on his back, sporting a unrelenting erection with Draco’s head on his shoulder, Harry’s arm around his back, hand around Draco’s middle. Draco’s arm is thrown over Harry’s chest and his leg over Harry’s thighs. It feels _familiar. It feels right. Like everything Harry has been wishing for._

Despite the thunderous pace of his heart, there is a delicious stillness to the moment. Something Harry hasn’t experienced in a long, long time. The barely-morning light cuts through the curtains, but the real winner is Harry’s own handiwork. It’s the second slightly smaller Christmas tree he’s decorated only with floating candles that burn softly with magical fire, without melting or ever being an actual hazard in his old house that is half made of wood. The candles only flicker to life when there’s someone in the room but Harry likes to think of them as perpetually burning.

If it wasn’t for _his pressing issue_ and the anxiety coiling slowly around his heart like a boa and squeezing, it would be the perfect Christmas Eve morning, with his lover in bed pressed against him, the house humming with magic around them and his small Christmas tree bringing him joy, looking like Santa might just pop out at any minute to drop their presents under the it.

Harry’s Christmassy train of thought derails once Draco has a luxurious stretch and Harry has to focus on anything — anything — but the very distinct feeling of Draco’s crotch rubbing against his hip. Alas, _anything_ doesn't help. Because instead of the feeling of Draco’s crotch rubbing against his hip, he focuses on how the light hits Draco just right, on the smell of Draco’s hair, the softness of the skin under his hand — exactly like he knew it would feel. And he thinks of all the places on Draco’s body he still knows so well, all the spots that feel surprisingly soft even though Draco looks sharp and pointy.

A low mewl slips through Draco’s lips, tickling the skin on the side of Harry’s neck and he lets himself _enjoy it for one second_. Draco’s eyes flutter open, softly and slowly and he doesn’t seem as surprised as Harry. In fact, Draco looks the most content he has since Harry saw him for the first time, all those weeks back in his hotel bed.

“Good morning,” Draco says, voice gravelly and low.

“Hi.”

Harry wonders if he should attempt to move away but then Draco’s right hand, the one over Harry’s chest, moves. Slowly but deliberately. A motion that feels familiar and right and, well, really fucking good. He strokes over Harry’s chest, softly, long fingers tickling the skin, from his collarbone, down his sternum. A constant switch between gentle caresses with the tips of his fingers and the hint of scratches. Draco’s hands move across his stomach and down, down, down—

“Draco,” Harry warns.

“I want—”

“I can’t.”

Draco’s expression changes. Harry is expecting disappointment, anger, distance. But it’s nothing like that. If anything, Draco goes impossibly softer yet determined. His hand leaves Harry’s chest and his leg slides off Harry’s. He turns over properly now, fully on his side, facing Harry’s body.

And Harry can tell Draco’s hand is moving under the sheets, before he feels it ghosting over his inner thigh. Draco’s fingers say _“let me”_ and Harry’s heart crumbles because _he wants. He shouldn't, he really shouldn’t, but Merlin, he wants._

A desperate, panicked noise leaves Harry’s mouth without him meaning it to.

“Harry.” And it’s said with such fervour, such reverence. Like sweet, thick, syrup trickling out of Draco’s lips. “Please.”

Harry could swear his brain shuts down for a few seconds, then his body is moving without his control and he’s on his side, face mere inches away from Draco’s. “Draco, I can’t,” he says, but his hands cradle Draco’s face. His brain finally connects with his body just then, and the feeling of touching Draco’s face like this, _like he used to,_ is burning through every vein in his body. He closes his eyes, overcome with emotion and, barely a second after, he feels it. A brush of lips against his own. _Fuck. He needs to stop this. He has to. It’ll hurt too much after._

“I miss you,” Draco whispers against his lips and Harry can’t take it anymore. He kisses back, properly. He drops one of his hands, squeezes it around Draco and pulls him into himself. The other hand wraps around Draco’s neck as they kiss, desperate and hungry. “I miss you,” Draco says again, louder.

_Fuck._

Harry rolls onto his side, heart hammering in his chest, a voice on the very back of his mind telling him he’ll regret this, but Draco feels _good_ against him.

He can feel Draco’s cock swelling against his thigh and Harry just can’t help it — he presses his hips forward the tiniest little bit and is rewarded with a deep, throaty moan.

And, after that, there isn’t really anything in the world that would get him to stop what Draco’s started.

Draco presses back against him and kisses him again, relentlessly. A balanced mixture of soft and gentle and filthy and deep. Harry keens under the attention, struggles to know where to touch, what to say, what to do with his hands, his lips, his dick.

They rut against each other in a desperate rhythm, both still wearing pyjama bottoms and Harry begs without words. Arches up against Draco. Offers his mouth open to Draco’s fingers when they ghost over his lips.

He doesn’t want anything between them anymore. He can’t take it. He wants and the want is bigger than him, bigger than anything he’s ever felt. It’s always been that way with Draco. An all consuming flame, taking over his mind, his body, _his heart._

His heart that lurches hopelessly when Draco’s long fingers reach for the hem of his bottoms and he says, against Harry’s lips, _“Let me.”_

And Harry knows he won’t do anything Harry doesn’t want him to do — Harry knows he can stop this if he wants to. But he doesn’t want it to stop and he also knows Draco didn’t phrase it to be a question. “Let me” is a command, and one that Harry will follow happily.

Harry nods and Draco pulls his bottoms down, helps Harry shimmy out of them completely. Draco looks down and then back at Harry, hungrily, and in one motion, Draco pulls his own pyjama bottoms down, and hooks them just under his balls and pushes forward.

Harry doesn’t remember anything ever feeling this good. The delicious friction of Draco’s cock sliding against his, the jolt of pleasure he feels as Draco’s suddenly lube-slicked hand encircles both of them.

He’s ashamedly close and he wishes he had the will to stop, to do anything — anything but pant and squirm — but his brain is reduced to the movement of Draco’s hips against him, the friction of Draco’s cock against his, and the feeling of Draco’s warm breath against his neck.

He wants more, he wants to taste Draco, he wants Draco to fuck him, to break him apart, and Draco does. Not the way Harry was expecting, but he does — Harry is quite convinced, by accident — with one soft, half-whispered half-moaned word.

_“Baby.”_

And, without meaning to, Harry comes over Draco’s fist and the sheets and, as he does, he returns the soft word Draco has let him have with a broken _“I love you.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm a big believer in "fuck first, talk second," sorry to disappoint


	25. Twenty-Fifth of December

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here we go, friends, the end of our tale of Christmas woe is here!  
> I'll pop a little more info (you all know how much I can't shut up by this point) on the end notes, but I can't start without thanking Tai and Liv again for their Brazilian expertise, primaveracerezos and moonshout for beta reading and thestarryknight for _everything_. THANK YOU.
> 
> Merry Christmas!

When Christmas morning comes, it is, perhaps, the best and most terrifying Harry has ever had. His brain is struggling to process the whole Draco-in-his-bed thing and that’s even before it catches up with the “we had sex yesterday morning and then again last night” memory. Draco wakes up just as Harry is debating if he should make an escape and get breakfast ready. 

Draco kisses him soundly on the mouth. 

Harry’s worries and fears are forgotten until breakfast, and even then, there is something soothing about Draco sitting in his kitchen, wearing his clothes, looking at him like that. A spark of hope Harry shouldn’t let himself have. Even if Draco is to walk out of this house once again and leave Harry’s life in tatters, Harry feels like he’s due some answers that, so far, he hasn’t managed to get out of Draco. So, after a forkful of egg, he asks:

“Can I ask about it now?”

Draco nods as he sips his tea. “I suppose. If you must.”

“What was the spell actually meant to do?”

“I told you. I didn’t lie. It… localises the memory or chunk of related memories you want it to find, and erases it. You won’t notice any gaps in your memories, even with diagnostic spells, because the moments are still there, the base level memories. It… just gets rid of everything at core level. Feelings, emotions.”

“Why test it on yourself? In Brazil?”

“Because I created it for myself, Harry,” Draco says, slowly and solemnly. 

Oh.

“What were you trying t— actually, no, I don’t think I need to know that.” He’s curious, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Draco would be wanting to forget his memories from the war, from living with Voldemort, from the things he did.

“ _You_ ,” Draco says. 

Harry isn’t quite sure he understands what Draco is saying and just looks at him, waiting. 

“I was trying to forget you.”

“Fuck. Draco.” he says, because he doesn’t know what else to do. Harry knows what his next question was going to be. He spent the better part of a night trying to figure out what the latin for the spell was, what it could mean, how it was related to the spell itself. _Eternal sun..._

And suddenly, it clicks. He knew it sounded familiar. He remembers watching the film with Hermione a couple of years back — how it had felt like a kick in the stomach. How he wished he could forget, sometimes. And without really meaning to say it, he whispers: _“That bloody film.”_

“ _Oh._ I wasn’t sure you got the reference. I thought it was really clever.” Draco says, with clear sarcasm. “At least you know that I can’t even take credit for the idea for my own spell.”

“Draco, I—”

“ _I walked out. I walked out the door,_ ” Draco quotes, and sighs, not meeting Harry’s eyes. “That’s what Jim Carrey says to Kate Winslet in that scene. _‘I wish I had stayed… I wish I had done a lot of things.’_ It is the most painful film I have ever watched. It planted the idea in my head, I guess.”

“What went wrong?”

“Harry…”

“No. Not… not _that_. With the spell. What went wrong?” If they’re having this conversation, Harry needs to know everything. 

“Oh.” Draco looks almost disappointed that Harry is asking about the spell.

“Sam, the lady from the room next to mine? She touched me. While I was halfway through casting. You know how it has the location spell? It requires some time for it to set, because you need to cast it, and then think about what memories you want gone. I’d left the door open and I’d told her to come in and grab a book I had that she wanted to read. She just touched my arm. It was dumb. I… I just wasn’t thinking and it all went wrong. I’m glad they sent you. I…” He swallows, audibly, then, as if he’s gathering courage to say what he wants to say. “I think we all would have died if it hadn’t been you...”

“I’m glad they sent me, too,” he says and focuses back on his breakfast.

Silence stretches for a while. All the way until the end of breakfast, until dishes are done, until they’ve both climbed the stairs up to Harry’s bedroom and Harry got in the shower, until Draco got in the shower after him, while Harry tidied and realised there is no way he can pull together anything remotely Christmas-worthy with how bare his pantry and cold cabinet are. It all feels odd, like a ghost of a routine — something they used to have but doesn’t belong here anymore.

Draco finds him in the living room, watching the flurries come down, hit the ground and melt immediately. “It’s not exactly a white Christmas, but at least it’s not over 25 degrees,” Draco says as he crosses the room toward Harry.

“No. Thank Merlin for that.”

Draco settles next to Harry by the window and leans over the polished windowsill. He looks at Harry and then away again. Harry keeps his eyes on the falling snow. 

“Smoke?” Draco says, finally.

“I thought you disapproved of that.”

“Lots of things I used to disapprove of, I suppose. I still think weed smells much better.”

“I never said that wasn’t true,” Harry offers, and summons a pack of cigarettes from across the room. 

He passes one to Draco, pops one in his own mouth and lights them both with his wand. Draco’s hand goes for the window latch but Harry asks him not to bother. “It’s cold out. I’ll spell the air clean after. Promise.”

And Draco smiles at his promise.

It’s a few more minutes until one of them speaks again, the only sounds filling the air their inhales and exhales and the fire crackling on the fireplace.

“Did you get Pansy and Blaise presents this year?”

“I always do,” Harry says, a little more defensively than he intended to.

“Ah. That’s going to be fun for Blaise without me in the house.”

“What do you mean?” Harry asks, even though he does think he wants to know.

“It’s… a tense moment. Blaise never opens his.” Harry’s expression must show how much that hurts because Draco grimaces back at him. “Pansy opens hers, which leads to her wanting to talk about you, which is not anyone’s favourite subject.”

_Fuck._

“They miss you,” Draco adds finally, after a moment of awkward silence.

“I miss them,” Harry confesses.

Draco seems to think this over for a long while, then, tentatively, he says: “You— you could come see them, if you wanted. It’s Blaise’s birthday in a couple of days, you could… come over.”

And, at Harry’s confused face, he says: “About what I said earlier… I did regret it.” A pause. “Leaving, I mean. I didn’t know how to reach out after, how to fix things. And the longer I let time pass… the more I felt like an idiot. But I don’t think either of us were willing to change enough.”

“I want to say I was. That I would have been willing to do whatever it was you wanted. But I think you’re right.” This is the most honest Harry has been about what happened just outside this very room, four years ago. He chooses his next words carefully.

“I am now, though. Willing to do whatever it takes.”

Draco’s head snaps towards him, then, eyes cloudy and worried but a soft smile playing at his lips. “You are?”

“Mhmm. We know what we did wrong last time,” he says, hoping that explains everything he needs to say. 

“I’ll make sure the spell is working before our next break up?”

“Too soon, Malfoy. Too soon,” Harry says, but laughs and shakes his head.

“Shall I write Mother and Pansy to let them know I am well and sadly won’t be back today and we can spend the rest of Christmas in your bed?” Draco says, when he finally finishes his cigarette and vanishes it. 

“You do that,” Harry agrees. “I’ll Apparate over to the Burrow to nick us some Christmas dinner?”

“Splendid.”

Harry turns to put his shoes on but before he crosses the threshold into the corridor, Draco says “Potter?” and Harry turns back just in time to see him finish casting something above his own head.

“Forgotten something?” Draco asks and Harry laughs. Above Draco’s head, hanging from the ceiling is a bunch of mistletoe. He walks back into the room and wraps his hands around Draco’s middle.

“You could have just asked.” Harry says against Draco’s neck. “We’re doing that now, yes? Asking for what we want? Being honest?” Draco asks in response.

Harry kisses him then. “Yeah. We are.”

And just like that, Harry Apparates over to the Burrow just in time to catch Teddy attempting to rope Ginny into showing him how to manage what’s now known as a Weasley Manoeuvre on his newly-polished broom while Andromeda is distracted by the sherry.

Hugs take longer than usual. Molly blushes all the way to the roots of her white hair when Harry tells her he loves her. Teddy laughs, wriggles out of his grasp and runs around the room. He comes back a minute later and stage whispers an “I love you too” back at Harry like it’s a great secret. Charlie looks at him like _he knows._ Like he’s happy that Harry’s happy and when tears start prickling behind Harry’s eyes, he makes his excuse and says he’s tired and has to get back to bed.

It’s hard to stop thinking about how he’s taking Molly’s leftovers to Draco, who’s in his bed, wearing his clothes and looking heart-breakingly beautiful, and they’ll eat turkey and roasties and then fruitcake and cheesecake in bed and do nothing but kiss each other for a very long number of days.

He’s putting the leftovers down on the windowsill as he grabs his coat and scarf off the hook on the wall. It’s weird, popping in to steal leftovers, especially after missing everyone so much. But they’re family. They understand. Harry isn’t lying — he is exhausted and he did just get back from Brazil. They don’t need to know all the details.

“Harry…” starts Hermione, walking into the hallway slowly, stalling his spiral of guilt and excitement. Her voice is strained, higher than usual, although she’s obviously not drunk. 

She’s worried, he realises when he looks at her face. He wants nothing but to tell her, to soothe her, but it all feels too fragile, too prone to breaking too quickly again and Harry can’t let it happen.

Ron sneaks up behind Hermione and kisses her on the cheek, making her giggle.

“Hey love, you’re not worrying about Harry, are you?” He asks her. Harry loves this, loves that Ron knows just what to say or what to do even if it’s blunt and to the point.

“Ron!” She says, in an admonishing tone, bats his hand away.

“Well, I’m not. And you shouldn’t either, “ Ron says as he gives Harry the biggest shit-eating grin, and Harry knows he’s screwed. “Look at him. I’m pretty certain he’s trying to escape with all those leftovers because he’s got his favourite blonde hiding in his bed.”

Harry feels his face heat up instantly. Hermione perks up, both eyebrows flying up into her fringe. Well, so much for not saying anything.

“How do you…?” Harry trails off, unsure what exactly what he wants to ask. 

“Harry, you sent me to get his papers! Even the Department of Mysteries couldn’t keep _that_ big a secret after the mess I had to make to get to Draco’s desk.”

“Ah, yes. That makes sense. Well, I’m off then,” he says with an awkward laugh and a wink. And then he remembers, very suddenly, that it’s important to state your feelings, even if you think they’re obvious and widely known so he looks back at his best friends in the whole world and says: “I love you both.”

And with his arms full of tubs with leftovers, he Apparates straight into his kitchen to drop the food and heads to the bedroom, where he knows Draco is still waiting. 

As he walks past the front room, he notices that standing out against the deep green of the tree, amongst his red baubles and twinkling golden lights is his silver snake-shaped ornament.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> first of all, if you haven't watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind i highly recommend it (you'll need tissues), but here's a little [link to the scene Draco refers to in this chapter](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTmlNigifSI). if you guessed that's what i was going for like four chapters ago, well done!
> 
> secondly, i know this isn't necessarily a _happy_ ending. it's a hopeful ending, which, really, is all we can wish for in 2020. in all seriousness, i like stories that don't feed me all the answers. it's up to you if they break up again in four months, if by next Christmas Draco has managed to effectively Aeternus Solem himself for good, if Harry realises he actually had feelings for Pansy too and they become a triad, if Harry and Draco just work hard and make it work because they love each other and they want to be together and are willing to put in the work.
> 
> for me, it's the latter. they talk a lot. they communicate. they don't hold back. the relationship i have drip fed you through 24 chapters via flashbacks isn't ideal and they have a lot to work on. i like to think they do.
> 
> i hope this satisfies your poor wee hearts that i delighted in torturing for the past month. if you've been reading along from the beginning, thank you. it means the world to me. 
> 
> i am [on tumblr too](https://onbeinganangel.tumblr.com) if you want to come chat! 
> 
> with all that said, i'll shut up and go eat my own weight in chocolate. i hope your day is merry and bright, whether you're reading this on Christmas Day or any other day of the year!


End file.
